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| One of my favorite photos that Jayme did! |
This past Friday night was the big event! We hosted our Adoption Dinner/Silent Auction to raise money for our adoption. Our color scheme was yellow and blue. The colors went along with the adoption photos we had done the week before. Decorations- I bought discounted blue table cloth from the party store for the tables. My friend had some left over burlap from a bridal shower that we used for the center of the tables. I collected jars for three months and then spray painted them yellow and added baby breath to them to use as center pieces. I also spray painted old puzzle pieces to spread out in the middle to go along with our puzzle fundraiser theme. We also used our photo props from the week before for some decorations. We had some balloon displays donated by Kristy's Balloon Utopia. So grateful to my friends that helped us setup decorations and auction items the night before.
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| The jars for the tables. |
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| The puzzle pieces and jars for the center pieces. |
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| A couple props for our photos. |
Dinner- Daniel's sister and brother in law donated the dinner. We had pulled pork sandwiches, potato salad and baked beans. For dessert we had brownie sheet cake, peanut butter sheet cake and cupcakes that were also donated. There was a suggested $10 dinner donation but not mandatory. We had a sign and a jar setup by the food line for people to put their donation in. We raised $623.00 from the dinner!
Puzzle-We had a table setup with our puzzle fundraiser. My AWESOME friends helped manage this table. They kept a list of people who purchased puzzle pieces throughout the event. We sold 97 puzzle pieces during the event!! This event by far helped us sell the most pieces, $970.00 from the puzzle!
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Silent Auction- For three months we collected donations from friends, family and the community. We had 80 items that were auctioned off! When we first started this fundraiser I never imagined we'd ever have that many items for the auction. My thoughts were maybe 20. God truly blessed us with some great generous people who donated items. We had a wide range of items that were donated; dinner certificates, purses, jewelry, photography, paintings, hair certificates, quilts, kid items and so much more! (I will get a list together and post it for anyone interested in hosting your own event to give you some ideas). We ran the auction from 6-7:30. A timer was set when there was 5 minutes left. Once the timer went off we collected all the papers and announced the winning bids. My friend and aunt got the items as we announced them. Then dad and my uncle helped to collect money. When all was said and done the auction items brought in $2,203.00!
With all three parts of our dinner/silent auction we raised a total of $3,796.00!! We are truly thankful for the way things turned out for this fundraiser. We cannot express how much we appreciate everyone that came out to support us Friday night. It brings tears to my eyes every time I think about how lucky we are to have amazing people in our lives that are just as excited as we are about trying to adopt a child. We cannot wait to share the experience with everyone. Thank you!!
Puzzle update:
Week 9- 6 pieces!
Week 10- 0 pieces
Week 11- 16 pieces!
Week 12- 4 pieces!
Week 13 (including selling pieces during the auction)- 118 pieces!!
That brings our total puzzle pieces sold so far to ...... 248 pieces!!
If you would like to help out with our puzzle fundraiser, each piece is $10.We will write your name on the back and once all pieces are bought we will frame the puzzle in a double sided glass frame and hang in the nursery. You can pay by cash, check, credit card, our gofundme account, or securely through the paypal link listed below or on the right hand side of the blog. Please be sure to include your name so that we can add it to the puzzle piece! This puzzle will show our child all the people who helped to bring them home to us! Thank you for buying puzzle pieces!!!! I will try to get an updated picture of the puzzle soon.
Adoption photos:
Last week a teacher friend took photos for us. Instead of doing pregnancy photos, we did adoption photos! The night before my friend and I spent hours shopping for and creating props for our photos. We found almost everything we needed at Hobby Lobby. I had pinned a bunch of photos on pinterest that I had wanted to do. Jayme did a fabulous job capturing each one. We were very excited with the results. We used a couple of the photos to display at our dinner Friday night. Hope you enjoy some of our favorites! :-)
So far we have a total of $5,844.00! We are 19.48% of the way to our estimated goal!!! It has only been three months since we started doing fundraisers!! I'm pretty sure we cannot say thank you enough for everyone who has helped us, rather you have helped with a fundraiser or have been praying for our journey. I really cannot wait to tell our future child how blessed we are with amazing people. I'm so thankful God has placed each of you into our lives.
We will spend much of this week getting caught up on writing our thank you cards. Then we will start working on our next fundraiser. Details coming soon...
