Theme: Revived and Transplanted

Location: Rainforest Retreat

Year: 2018

Art: Paul McGhee

Invite backstory:

After a lost decade without Artichoke parties, this invite helped us relaunch the Madness with the strong ‘Revived and Transplanted’ rally cry after we moved to Seattle. 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 at the base of the artichoke from the replanting effort.

If you look closely, you can see a profile o 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’ 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 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 court so we went old school. I cooked all the artichokes, we created 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 and that worked great and has become a staple of the Seattle party.

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 made their first Artichoke Madness party