The best kind of dreams are the ones with your favorite parts of reality and the best kind of parties are the ones you’ve seen in your wildest dreams. I’ve never been the one to throw a party but I’m in love with the idea of creating the simpleness of your surroundings into surreal pieces of perfection. And by that I mean is that I threw myself a dinosaur themed party for my graduation because I’ve only dreamt about it since I was a little girl. 

For well over a year now, I had my eyes set on buying a perfectly gold and outrageously chic bar cart. Of course, my college budget would maybe let me pay for just the wheels, if that. And after extensive research (around five minutes of googling) I found out just how far a can of gold spray paint, marble decal, and an IKEA cart could get me. And let me tell you, it got me perfectly gold and outrageously chic, far. AND, it was easy as what starts with F and rhymes with puck (fuck).

For the Bar Cart you will need:

• White Primer
• Gold Spray Paint
• BYGEL utility cart (only $30!)
• Marble Decal
• A glass or three of wine (the cutest wine glasses you’ll ever need!)

What you’ll need for your party:

• Mini Dinosaurs
• Gold Wine Glasses
• Gold Napkins
• Old or Broken Records
• Striped Tablecloth
• and other cool gold things like gold pineapples, gold coasters, or gold bar sets

Shop The Party and Bar Cart Essentials

Steps:

1. Take apart the cart or simply take the shelves and wheels and spray paint with primer twice. I waited around 30 minutes to 1 hour in between sprays.
2. Once primer is dry, spray evenly with gold paint. Two coats should be fine and give it the night to dry to spray on the second coat.
3. For the shelves, I found the easiest way was to outline the tray face down on the back of the marble decal and leaving a little extra room to fold over along the edges.
4. I used scissors to cut the decal and tiny nail scissors to cut the edges in order for the decal to fold over the bottom since they were round. I also ran out of blades for my exacto knife so this is an alternative but still worked pretty well!
5. Sticking on the decal is a two girl job so make sure someone (very patient) is there to help you stick on the marble evenly.
6. As you’re sticking it on, with a credit card or a flat wooden spatula flatten out the decal so most bubbles disappear.
7. With a very thin pin needle you can pop any bubbles if it bothers you as much as it bothers me.
8. Put the cart together again.
9. Get yourself pretty decor, a few bottles, or Moscow mule mugs to decorate and it’s finished!

I jokingly (except I was entirely serious) told myself I wanted to have a grownup dinosaur party to celebrate my graduation and that is exactly what I did. And for those of you who do not know me all that well, I am obsessed with dinosaurs. It’s a little embarrassing and I don’t usually tell people. I picked up around 10 of the mini dinosaur toy bags (so around 50) and a few mini plastic water guns and spray painted them all gold. I placed them EVERYWHERE. You could easily compare it to the scene on Jurassic Park where John Hammond welcomes them to Jurassic Park and zooms into the herd of dinosaurs with only the most classic film score of all. Except in this case the herd was all over my cake, bar cart, tables, floral arrangement, and condiment stand and I pretended they were all doing the monster mash as it played repeatedly throughout the party. As for the utterly chic black and white striped tablecloth, it was bought in Ikea because I could not find a reasonably priced tablecloth anywhere physically or anywhere online that would be delivered on time.

There you have it! Inspiration and how-to’s for an adult dinosaur party and instruction on making your own bar cat! You could probably use it to hold your cheese.

P.S. If I wasn’t as caught up with graduation as I was, I would’ve had 5x the dinosaurs.