The island of Lanai is one of the remote islands in Hawaii that you usually don’t hear about. From Waikiki you have to take a prop plane to a landing strip that was part dirt and part pavement. The island used to boast that it had the largest pineapple plantation in the world. It doesn’t exist anymore, largely because it was too hard to get ships over there to get these pineapples off the island. Now the only things there are small, quaint town and two amazing resorts, one of which was the site of a number of events for a corporate client.
There were three events in all for this incentive trip and we were challenged with what we could do by the lack of proper shipping and the fact that there wasn’t anything on the island that we could use. Even flowers were expensive to ship. But even so, we were able to pull off some really cool stuff, such as this final night event.
The theme was “Blue Hawaii” and featured long banquet tables, much like you would see at a Hawaiian luau but with a touch of elegance.
The banquet tables featured aqua, teal and royal blue lamour linens from
BBJ Linen, with a specialty square overlay called “Coral Reef Nights” to tie them all together. The only flower used throughout the entire event were white dendrobium orchids -- simple and elegant.
The centerpiece of this party was a bar.. It was our focal point of the evening. We created a ‘canopy’ of white dendrobium orchids over the top bar, strung together much like you would make a ‘popcorn garland’ that you do at Christmas time for your Christmas tree. You should have seen the guys with needle and thread sitting under the palms canopies making these! We knew we had to use the lighting trees to hang these from, so we sewed royal blue covers to get rid of the ugliness of these light poles. One lesson we learned was that when you do this many flowers up in the air, they can act as a sail! Which is why we added sandbags to each one of the poles.
And here are Jahon and Jose filling those sandbags... lots of them!
Ah, the money shot. The same light poles we used to actually string the flowers, were also used for ... lighting! Go figure. To turn these white dendrobium orchids blue, we cross lit them in teal and congo blue. Look at the stage in the background of this picture. We were up at the only hardware store in town one day and came across all this aluminum screening. The same screening that you put in screen doors or on porches. Apparently there are a lot of screen doors on the island. I bought three rolls of 54-inch-wide aluminum screening and scrunched (yes, this is a technical term!) it up. When you scrunch up aluminum, it stays that way (note: always wear heavy gloves when you do this. It’s hell on the hands if you don’t). Aluminum also soaks up light, so by simply putting a light at the base of each screen, we achieved an amazing effect. In between the aluminum screening, I used royal blue and teal silk ribbon to tie the stage into the Blue Hawaii theme.
