A few weeks ago I had a shower for my sister in law and her new baby boy. I didn't want to have a traditional baby pastel colors so I went with the primary colors. Also I didn't want to have a bunch of decorations left over that I would have to store. I therefore decided most of the decorations would be things that the baby would be able to use.
I love the look of bunting, and I know it has been around for a while but I just had to make some. Actually my husband did all of the cutting for it. I bought some a pad of scrapbook paper for it, and some ribbon. We then just glued and stapled the paper onto the ribbon. Another thing that I love is the big pom poms. I see the ones from Martha Stewart for sale in the stores and they aren't cheap. So again we made them ourselves (my mother in law and I). I went to the dollar store and got some tissue paper, folded it up, wrapped with some wire and pouf-ed! Again I love how these look, and were so simple to do!
I went to Zellers and got some first word flash cards to decorate with as well. We hung them on the mantle and off of the counter in the kitchen with string and clothespins. This was so simple and had a great impact. Also I found some great wooden blocks to put all over the place. These were a bit harder to find then I originally thought. I did find them at Micheal's but found them cheaper at
PM Hobey Craft. As well as the wooden blocks I had some plastic building blocks put around everywhere.
A great centerpiece was the diaper cake. When buying the diapers for this I was shocked to see how expensive diapers are. I found this great
video explaining how to put it all together. As the diapers I found were not solid white I needed to get ribbon to match. I used blue ribbon and white ribbon with rubber duckies on it. Tried to make the ribbon on the top look like a splash of water with the ducky on top. I also cut out a circle and put his initial on it.
I have read online about showers in which each guest gets to decorate a onsie. I thought that this is a good idea, but the mother would have way too many onsie's in the end. So I had one in which each guest could decorate and sign their name.
We played a bunch of games at the shower as well. I had a baby bottle filled with jelly bellies and everyone had to guess how many there were. Another was I made a bunch of slips of paper with baby items written on them. We pined these to each of the guests backs and they had to ask yes or no questions to other people to guess what was on their back. This was a good game for people to get talking to everyone. Another game we played which was a lot of fun was guess what is in the jar. I went out and got a bunch of baby food and took the labels off each of the jars and put a letter on the jars. Everyone had to guess what was in each of the jars of food. This was tough as most food looks the same when pureed.
I thought for the cake I would make something really simple, especially since I was so busy with everything else. I just decorated it with white icing and put some bunting on top held up by some bamboo skewers. It was simple and cute.
I have been seeing cake pops on all sorts of blogs and just had to try making them. They weren't too hard to make although time consuming. I just used regular out of the box cake mix for it and canned icing. I really like how the sprinkles make them look so fancy. And I thought they were crazy good. I can't wait to make them again!
I also decided to make labels for the water bottles that matched the bunting. These turned out great and are much prettier then plain bottles!
For favors I decided to make Hot Chocolate on a stick. A saw these on a blog (don't know which one) and thought I really need to make these. I found
this site with the instructions. When I put them in the milk they did not melt as easily as I would have liked. I think I needed a higher quality chocolate then what I was using. I also made homemade marshmallows with Alton Browns
recipe. These were super good.
