Paper Prinsesa: Rebecca's Baby Shower

As soon as my sister told me she was having another baby (after jumping up and down and congratulating her of course) I was immediately thinking of the baby shower. I had planned a couple of baby showers before but I was eager to try my hand at doing a big event and making a lot of the decorations myself.
A lot of the decorations that I make are very feminine and girly and what better event to make them for than a baby shower? Thankfully, my sister was all for me planning it and I really went to town on this one!
It was a lot of work but I've never had more fun! My sister didn't really give me any parameters about what she wanted, but we did know she was having a baby girl so I decided to go really girly and pretty with the decos (lots of flowers and butterflies). I didn't want to stick with the usual boring baby pastel colour palette though. The shower was in March and I wanted pretty, but bold, vibrant colours to give it more of an edge so I choose purple, black and white as my theme colours.

I decided to try my first attempt at a diaper cake. The first diaper cake I saw was made by a friend and presented at a baby shower I attended and I thought it was such a fantastic idea! For anyone who doesn't know what this is, it's diapers that are rolled up individually and then put together to form the shape of a 2 , 3 or 4 tiered cake. Inside and outside are baby products like baby lotions and shampoos, diaper cream etc.. It's such a great way to give the mom-to-be some much needed baby supplies and diapers in a creative way!
Once again, I wanted to veer away from a "baby theme" so I just put the baby products (baby lotion, powder, shampoo and diaper cream) inside the layers of the "cake". The outside I opted to decorate with flowers and ribbon.
For my first attempt I was pretty pleased with the outcome. I'll put a how-to tutorial on how to make them at another time.

I wanted a personal touch for the give-aways so I started with a tissue paper dahlia that I filled with a small bag of gourmet jelly beans of assorted flavours. I attached a tag with the date of the shower and then stamped a butterfly on the front. I made both purple and white and they were so pretty!

Another giveaway for our shower guests were the small jars of brazilian fudge. A friend that we used to go to church with has a gourmet fudge business so we had several delicious flavours made for the shower. We gave her our colour palette and she had matched this with a fabric covering for the top of the jars. Each jar also came with a personalized tag and spoon. Check out the link to her website for the Fudgy Truffle.

They were amazing!! Thank you Vanessa!

http://thefudgytruffle.com/

I also handmade tags for the prizes we gave to the winners of the baby shower games.

The purple and black pattern paper I found at Michael's Craft store and it was the jumping off point for choosing the colour scheme for the rest of the shower decorations. The patterns is quite bold so I paired it with a light purple cardstock.

The baby shower banner used the same patterned paper. I was worried that the purple and black paper together might be too busy because the print is so bold, but in the end I think they worked well together.

On the left are cupcake picks that I made with the patterned paper, different shades of purple cardstock and toothpicks. I also wanted to add some visual interest by using different flower shapes.

On the right, I had to hand cut the butterflies and they were a real pain! The small holes were really difficult and time consuming!
Not sure I would do those ones again, but at least they were pretty!

These tissue paper poms were one of my favourite things to make. They are so easy to do and have such a great impact. You can make them whatever sizes you want. I put them all over the house for the shower! I have a link in the Tea Party blog to Martha Stewart's website that gives you a step-by step tutorial, if you would like to try your hand at them.

These smaller tissue paper poms I had decided to hang above the chair for the mom to be, but I would caution against stringing them together ahead of time. It's a bit more time consuming to do them on location but they got so tangled up together during transport, that I think it would have been easier, and definitely less frustrating to have strung them together and up at my Mom's place.

I bought some flowers from the dollar store in the right colours and just pulled them apart and into the right lengths and placed them in various sized jars to make pretty table accents.

Unfortunately, the lighting was really poor in the house and so a lot of the pictures were dark and blurry but here are a few that show what the decorations looked like once they were up.