A short shelf for a long afternoon
Eight pieces: two napkin packs, a dessert plate run, a table cover, a hanging decoration and three mixed graduation sets. A graduation party is a rolling open house rather than a seated meal — people arrive across four hours, eat something off a small plate, and leave. The buying list is short and deep: small plates and napkins in quantity, one cover, one piece of signage.
Cap and tassel, or school color
Graduation stock splits two ways. Cap-and-tassel and Congrats Grad prints say what the party is for without a sign; plain school color stock says which school without a logo. The second route travels further, because it works for the ceremony, the team banquet in the same week and the dorm send-off in August, while a dated print is finished the day after.
Counting an open house
An open house does not have a guest count, it has an arrival curve. The useful number is plates per hour rather than plates per guest: a party expecting sixty people across four hours rarely has more than twenty on the lawn at once, but it will still get through eighty plates and twice as many napkins over the afternoon. Pack counts are printed on each card and run small on this shelf, so read them against the afternoon rather than the guest list.
Two parties, one order
Most households buy graduation goods twice in a year — once for the ceremony weekend and once for the send-off at the end of summer. Buying the plain school-color pieces in the larger pack covers both, and the dated pieces are better bought thin: one pack of the cap-and-tassel napkins carries the theme and nothing else has to.