You're Invited

Some of our friends are expecting their first baby in September, and I recently hosted a baby shower for the mom-to-be. It was small and casual, but I wanted to share a few of the things I did in case you need ideas for the future!

Taking my cue from the neutral colored lamb theme of the nursery, I made these baby shower invitations to send:

All things considered, it was a pretty simple design with minimal coloring, so they went together pretty quickly. Well, that is until I ran out of that brown ribbon. Whoops! I guess you really should measure everything before you get started, eh? No worries though. Lord knows I have enough other spools of coordinating ribbon that I could use as backups.

Here's the whole lot together. You can see that one at the front of the picture has a smaller gingham ribbon instead of the wide triple stitch brown (which I bought at Hobby Lobby yyyyears ago, and love, if anyone is curious... must get back for more...)

I held the shower in the afternoon from 2-4pm. Since it fell between meals, I didn't want to have a lot of food, but I did want to have a few snacks and, of course, a cake, too. Here's the simple tablescape and menu: smoked almonds, pretzels with horseradish dip, Cape Cod Cracked Pepper Potato Chips (have you tried them? I was just introduced in May and haven't bought any other brand or flavor since that day), crackers with a cream cheese/sweet red pepper spread, peanut butter M&M's (another personal favorite), and a german chocolate cake.

You can also see the two gifts on the table for the game winners. I contemplated buying gifts for this purpose, but in the end decided to pull from my overstocked and underused cabinet of Partylite candles. Each winner received a box of 6 votives in the "Zen" scent. It didn't even make a dent in my collection, which is pretty sad. A few weeks ago I finished burning a medium sized candle that we received as part of a wedding gift 12 years ago. This is how fast I go through candles. It doesn't stop me from buying more though! It's a sickness, I swear.

I printed up some easy nametags on mailing labels. Avery makes so many great sized labels. If you use your imagination you can do a lot of interesting things with them. I made these up using the Roselyn font, and then rolled across the bottom of each one with Mellow Moss ink to jazz them up a little.

Our first game was Name The Baby Food. We passed around ten open containers of baby food (stage 2, all having two more flavors), and guests were able to spoon a little onto their plate and taste each one. Some tasted, some smelled... In fact the girl who got the most correct (6/10) never tasted a single one. I was totally impressed. I printed sheets for each guest with ten blank spaces on the left and the names of about 20 different flavors of baby food on the right for them to match to the numbers. I pulled the names of the extra flavors off the Gerber website. I wanted to make sure they were all legitimate flavors, because we had enough moms of little ones in the room that someone would have probably known a fake name if I tried to make one up. I also made these cute little cozies for each container because the name of the flavor is printed on the outside. I needed to hide it somehow, and I'm all about pretty, so I wrapped each one with sage colored tulle and coordinating ribbon. The numbers were printed on my Cricut and then added to punched circles before being glued on to the side of the container.

Our second and final game was a simple guessing game. How many Almond Joy pieces fit into a 4 oz. Dr. Brown's glass baby bottle? Well, 167 to be exact. Mom-to-be got to keep the bottle (chosen from her registry) AND Almond Joy pieces as part of her gift.

It was a lovely afternoon with a lot of visiting and sharing of stories. I just love hosting things like this, and I also love welcoming new babies into the world!