Theme: Revived and Transplanted

Location: Rainforest Retreat, Seattle

Year: 2018

Art: Paul McGhee

Invite backstory:

After a lost decade without Artichoke parties, this invite helped us relaunch the Madness after our move to Seattle with the strong ‘Revived and Transplanted’ rally cry. It is one of my favorite and there are some fun things going on here:

We brought back the ‘every invite is unique’ idea by manually adding the flying dirt from the replanting effort at the base of the artichoke.

If you look closely, you can see a profile of the space needle embedded in one of the Artichoke Lady’s leafs to celebrate our move to Seattle.

If you look even more closely, you can see the color of the main ‘Artichoke Madness’ text descending into darkness and culminating in a single rain drop at the bottom of the final ‘S’ - the message being that all the rain in Seattle will drive you crazy.

But we had only been in Seattle for a month before the invite was created so we were still sane for this first party.

Party Highlights

We did this party shortly after moving into our house so we didn’t have time to get a chef or rent the foosball game so we went old school. I cooked all the artichokes, my brother Tim helped me create a hilarious old-school way to play human foosball with PVC pipes, chalk stripes, lots of ‘on your honor’ plays and human ball retrievers (see video below).

We also had a steep back yard and my buddy Dean Donovan loaned us his giant Slippery Slide which worked great and has become a staple of the Seattle party. See a cool slow motion video of my son’s ride (below).

We had 80 folks show up to our inaugural Northwest party including Smartsheeters, neighbors, swimmers, homeschoolers and the kids’ friends. My college buddy John Mandella and his wife Karen were living in the area and it was a treat to see them at their first Artichoke Madness party - Karen turned out to be a fierce Human Foosball player.