Spouses Night Out 2016: Home is Where the Air Force Sends You

My favorite base spouse event is here--Spouses Night Out! This has been MY event the past few years and this is my last one; we will be PCSing (moving to all you non-military folks) later this year. My first year the theme was TV shows and we had Mad Men. Last year the theme was board games and we chose The Game of Life.

For 2016, the event theme is Home is Where the Air Force Sends You. Each group was tasked with picking a base to use as the inspiration for their table decorations. As usual, our spouses voted on the bases they wanted on our "Dream Sheet" and Goodfellow AFB was at the top. I thought our chances were pretty high for getting our top choice because Goodfellow is not a very well-liked base. And lo and behold, we got our first choice!

Because Goodfellow AFB is in Texas, I knew I had to go with a Texas theme for at least one of our tables. I have never thought so long and hard about the Lone Star state. I got to work planning out our tables with some sketches.

At the end of SNO 2015, they announced the 2016 theme and a bunch of people immediately thought Texas would be a perfect option for us. Even though we didn't pick our theme until early 2016, I had spent pretty much the whole year with Texas in the back of my mind and I knew I wanted a big Texas state outline on my table. This table was inspired by the little graphic at the top--Things Texans Love. My sister is an adopted Texan (she moved there and doesn't plan on ever leaving). She shared that graphic once and I knew it would be the perfect inspiration for my table.

 

 

This table looks pretty boring from my sketch and I ended up having to re-do the layout anyway. The past two years we have had enough people for 3 tables, but this year we were down to two.

I love sheep. I have several sheep stuffed animals and figurines. San Angelo has fiberglass sheep around town that businesses sponsor and decorate. I knew I had to use sheep in my design. Because we were down to two tables, I could not dedicate a whole table to the sheep. I compromised and combined the Goodfellow and Sheep tables. 

I had a lot of fun designing the place cards for our tables. I made three different designs. Originally I was going to have one design per table, but then decided to just alternate.

These are based on the Whataburger table numbers. This idea was given to me by one of our spouses and I love how they turned out!

These place cards feature a vintage Goodfellow image and patches from some of the squadrons at Goodfellow.

And these show some of the Sheep of San Angelo. I love these the best, but I am biased towards sheep.

I also wanted something to hand out to people at the event...bribes are OK, right? I created a recipe card for kolaches--a Texas favorite. I found the recipe on Pinterest.

Stay tuned for pictures of the final design!