HOT DOG! The Bachelorette is back! And what a better way to celebrate than a party appropriately themed to reflect our new bachelorette’s philosophy on men and hot dog condiments?!

As many of my readers already know, my girlfriends and I are huge fans of the Bachelor. For those non-bachelor fans out there, last season Jillian immediately caught the attention of Bachelor Jason when she explained her theory regarding men and hot dog toppings:

“Ketchup guy is a good, strong, loyal, loving guy. He loves his mom and talks to her several times a week. Sauerkraut guy is the bad boy who they all go for. The onion guy – they all love him, but he’s never going to get married. And the mustard guy, that’s the guy who they all want to settle down with, because he’s part ketchup, part sauerkraut.”

While Jason claimed to be a mustard he acted like a kraut, leaving us with a brand new Bachelorette, and even more important, a reason to party!

Decorations

Since the theme was based on hot dogs, the food ended up becoming the central décor element of the party. In fact, I’m doing an entire post on the menu! Instead of plates, guests used ballpark-like hot dog boats. (24 for $2.99 at Hobby Lobby) I used larger ramekins to serve chili and cheese and set out relish, ketchup and mustard on a white platter.

I found some great striped scrapbook paper and choose coordinating solids to create detail elements like cupcake picks, napkin rings, beverage signs, drink markers and more.

My favorite part of the décor was the cupcake toppers with pictures of all 30 of Jillian’s potential suitors. Not only did they add to the decoration, but the girls had a great time hovering around to decide who was the cutest before the show began!

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As my loyal readers already know, I’m a huge fan of ABC’s The Bachelor. Last night I hosted a premiere party. It was so fun and you are going to love the pictures! To tide you over until I can get those I wanted to share a review of the new online invitation service I used.

There has been buzz throughout the blogosphere about the new online invitation service, Purple Trail. I’ve been waiting for a chance to try it out and my Bachelorette Premiere party presented the perfect opportunity.

An avid evite fan, I was hesitant to stray from the familiar. I decided to take a leap of faith on a small party where I knew I could call people if it didn’t work for some reason. Here is my feedback!

Design

The feature I loved best about Purple Trail was the ability to create a custom design. Evite’s system is kind of clunky and I’ve learned it is just best to go with their premade templates. Purple Trail allowed me to upload a picture that I created in Photoshop and customize the background color to match.

Usability

Filling in all of the party information was simple and self-explanatory. The thing I liked best was how quickly the site loads.

Features

A first time user, I decided to try out some of the “Modules” PT offers. First, I found a video preview of The Bachelorette premiere and embedded it on the invite. I also added a poll of my guests to see which condiments they liked on their hot dogs. (This ended up being very helpful when grocery shopping!) I also added the Google Map which I found worked much better than evite’s mapping solution.

Final Review

All in all, I had a positive experience with Purple Trail. In fact, I just received an email asking if I wanted to post pictures from my event or send thank you notes! I did notice slower responses than I normal but most guests ended up responding eventually. I liked that guests could keep their messages private or make them public.

Would I use it again? For the Bachelorette, definitely. But for an event with more people (especially events with guys) I’d be hesitant to stray from what everyone is comfortable with.