It's a baby shower!!

Ok, so many of you know that I've been planning a baby shower for a friend, Ruby. It seems like forever ago that I got started on the preparation, and it finally paid off on Friday night! I thoroughly enjoyed myself with planning and creating everything. I have to shout out a huge "thank you" to Kari who helped me with it all. I couldn't have done it without her help, as we sent out 50 invitations!!

If you know me, I'm not big into cutsey themes, or games, when it comes to showers. So if you're looking for something "babyish", don't even bother reading! lol I wanted something classy yet comfortable. If I had a "theme" at all, I guess you could say "polka dots".

When I learned that we were inviting 50 friends and family, it threw me for a loop. How was I going to accomodate that many?!?! We talked about the options of renting a place, going to a restaurant, or even doing it at church. I didn't like any of them. After talking to my mom, and another friend, I learned that "open house" baby showers are quite popular. So I decided to go that route, and do it at my home, hoping that everyone wouldn't come at the same time!

Colors: lighter blue, medium blue (that had a tinge of green), dark red, burnt orange, grayish-tan, dark brown, white, green (totally NOT baby colors! lol)

As for invites, I saw some scrapbook paper that I liked (but wasn't the right colors) and that gave me inspiration to design my own invite.

 
This one isn't trimmed yet, but you get the picture. One thing I learned was that colors on my monitor are very deceiving. What was on my screen and what printed out were totally different. I finally said it was "good enough" and just went with it!

Decorations-I kept these clean and simple:

 

 
 

 
I hung polka dots (in 4 different sizes) on fishing line. Over the food, the polka dots are on 2 hoops. And I used layed squares of cardstock to add color to the tables (the squares on this table should have been bigger but I originally wasn't going to put one here so it's a little small. You'll see bigger ones under the food) For flowers, I didn't think we could get hydrangeas around here this late in the year, so we did fake hydrangeas in square vases, and then added limes to the vases.

 

I love the look of the limes, but I should have "googled" how to do it before the day of the shower!Then I would have known all the tricks and saved us some time and frustration. I guess when most people do it, they cut their limes pretty thick, like 3/8"-1/2". And they use two vases, one smaller one inside the outer one. Then you place the slices inbetween the vases to hold them in place. For some reason, I was thinking that the lime slices would "stick" to the glass, but no such luck, they all floated!!

We thought of putting another container inside the vase, like a bag of rice, or another cup, but you could see them all. I tried my small juice cups, but nothing seemed to be the right size. So I got the idea to dehydrate the lime slices and "glue" them to the inside of the vase. We quickly threw our sliced limes into a dehydrator and started them drying while we worked on the rest of the food.

Well, then I decided that I didn't want to be cleaning the glue off the inside of my vases after we were done. So, after a little thought, I ran into my craft room and grabbed some old transparency sheets. I thought I could "build" my own "inner vase". I cut the 8 1/2 x 11" transparencies horizontally, 4" tall, and scored them every 3" (my vase is 4" wide but the inside tapers). I then hot glued 4-5 dehydrated lime slices onto each section of my transparency. I folded it on the scored edges and popped it into the vase-perfect!

 

Food:

We had some delicious stuff! Several of the ladies in the ward helped bring food. We plated it all beforehand on white square plates. I loved the simple, clean look of it.

We had bruschetta (from Sam's Club-I had never had it before-delicious!!! Top with a little fresh mozzeralla and it's as good as fresh!)

Veggie tray-love the dip in the red pepper, and the snap peas-mmmm....

Fruit kabobs-displayed in a watermelon-strawberries, cantelope, fresh pineapple, grapes, raspberries and kiwi-the fruit dip was fabulous too-a box of cream cheese pudding mix combined with fat free cool whip

Meatballs

Hot Cheese Bread Fondue-served in the sourdough bowl, with crackers and the leftover sourdough

Cake (we'll get back to this)

Chicken salad in toasted wonton cups

Homemade mints (chocolate, almond, mint)

 
 

 

Cake:

 
This was my baby!! I'm sure I spent way too much time on the computer trying to figure out how to do fondant. Even bought myself some DVD's that walk me through baking a cake, from start to finish. I learned a lot though-tips and tricks to baking cakes, doing fondant and gum paste, etc. I took the first two Wilton cake decorating classes back before I had kids, but I've never done fondant before. I was going to sign up the the Wilton class, but I missed the sign up. So I decided to learn it myself. I saw a cake similar to this online and decided that I had enough guts to try it. Even though the blue color was a little bright for my color scheme, I loved the look. It's a 9" round white cake (I doctored up a cake mix), 4 layers with a cookies n' cream frosting inbetween (just removed the innerds of oreos and ground up the cookies and added to my frosting). I purchased two fondants, a white and a chocolate (40% off because they are expensive)-just FYI-on my DVDs I learned how to make my own fondant which will greatly save me money in the future! I had heard that fondant tasted horrible, especially the Wilton brand. So I went to Michael's and go the Duff brand for the chocolate and I think the white was Satin ice. They tasted fine for being straight sugar! lol

So I just colored the white fondant with some blue gel coloring, rolled it out and put it on the cake. Then rolled out the chocolate fondant thinner, and used a set of three circle cookie cutters to cut each circle. Applied them to the cake, added some ribbon, and it was done!!

It was funny because everyone commented on the cake, and how awesome it looked, but no one wanted to cut it. I was even scared because I hadn't tried the fondant yet so I wasn't sure how it was going to taste. But I grabbed the knife and cut into it and removed a couple pieces so people would start cutting into it....I got rave reviews!

I opted to keep the drinks simple (ha, they were such a pain!) and do water bottles. I made up this label with the baby's name and due date, and printed them on cardstock. If you do these, don't use cardstock! The labels kept popping off when Kari tried to glue them. She used 4 different types of tape/glue and nothing held them. I finally bought the red tacky tape and it held-but such a pain. Loved the look-learned a lesson or two doing them.

Activities-

I don't like games, but I did have a couple things for the ladies to do. In the first basket I had 8x8 scrapbook pages. I designed 6 layouts and just printed multiple copies of each. The ladies were to take a page and write something to the parents, whether it be parenting advice, a funny parenting story, or best wishes, etc. Also, on each page I had a rectangle that said "photo here". We took a picture of each lady, and we are printing, cutting and gluing them to that rectangle to finish off he pages. Then we have an album we'll be adding them all to, and giving to the mom-to-be.

 

The second basket is full of blank envelopes. To help the mom-to-be with "thank you's", I had everyone address an envelop to themselves. This way the mom-t0-be won't have to spend time finding everyone's address. I also made thank-you cards to go with the envelopes.

 

I have a pretty standard "thank you" design that I love-the baby feet with "thank you" running through it. I did the foot prints in the various coloors and I dressed the card up by scoring a double border around the edge of the card. Simple and clean-loved it!

 

 

One last thing that we we're trying to do, but it didn't work out, was to do a book for the mom. I saw a cute idea where you collect pictures of the family and make a little book. I was going to digitally design it and have it printed by a company like Shutterfly so it was an actual book. On one page it would have a picture of, say, "Mom" and then on the opposite page it would say "Mom loves you". Flip the page and it would be Dad and say, "Dad loves you" and so forth. My friend is adopting the baby and the birth mom is going to be involved (it's an open adoption) so I thought it would be a great idea to include a picture of the birth mom, and her family and such. The last page would have said, "you are so loved!" Unfortunately, some of the family wasn't cooperative with sending photos so I wasn't able to do the book. But I'm blogging the idea for future reference.


For party favors, I designed a small gift box (about 2 1/2" x 2 1/2") and used my Cricut to cut them out of brown cardstock. Then I designed a ribbon like thing out of cardstock to dress it up and keep the lid closed. In the center of the paper ribbon, I designed a monogram sticker with the baby's first name initial in the middle, and then around the initial it said, "Thanks for helping us celebrate! We're so excited for Preston's arrival!" We then filled the boxes with M&Ms (candy closest to our colors). We had them on a little table right next to the door so they could grab them on their way out.

Ok, I think that's it. Whew!!! It was a lot of work, but totally worth it. I did learn a couple things through it all. I think next time I'll pick one or two things that I REALLY want to make, instead of making everything (one of the big drivers for custom making everything was to save costs because of the large numbers we had invited).  I learned that people really suck at RSVPing!! I had set a deadline but continued to get calls even up until the night before! We did a group gift and there were a lot of ladies that wanted to do that-unfortunately, I didn't set a date for the money to get to me. So I ended up with one lady saying that she'd "go in" on the gift, but she hadn't paid yet, but I went ahead and added her name to the card, expecting to get the money, and she ended up bringing her own gift. So I learned to set a deadline for the money too!

What have you done for baby showers or baby gifts lately? I'm always on the lookout for cute gifts. I have several friends that are pregnant (all due around the same time) and I'm doing another shower next month (though it's going to be very small and I decided to just foot the bill and take everyone out for lunch because T-day is already crazy and we're doing it the Sat. after). I'd tell you what I'm working on for shower gifts, but I know some of the expectant mothers read my blog so you'll just have to wait until I give them away!