Hello Blog. How are you? It has been a while since I’ve posted anything. I’ve felt a bit guilty about it, even though Jones assures me that I shouldn’t. Besides the normal day-to-day busyness, I felt like last month I was busy preparing for the rest of the summer. Does that sound weird? I planned two back-to-back trips (2 weeks in Utah, 2 weeks in Florida – literally a day between the two trips). The hubs has a 6 week internship starting while the kids and I are in Florida (in a city 3 hours from our home) and when he comes back it’s basically time to have baby #3. I guess I felt like I had a lot of little things to take care of before I was gone from home for a month.
Like I said, I’ve felt a bit guilty not contributing to the blog as much as I would like to and knowing I’d be gone from home for a month, I really didn’t know when I would have material that I deemed “blog-worthy”.
Little did I know that my sister-in-law was going to host a baby shower for a friend while I was in Utah and how awesome it was going to turn out! (And how much fun I would have help put this thing together)
My SIL Stephanie was the one hosting the shower. But it was my SIL Laura that kind of ran the show. She had tons of ideas and the determination to do it all. With perfection.
Maybe I should let the pictures speak for themselves?
*Note: if you’re looking at these pics and think to yourself, “Wait a minute? Haven’t I seen something like this on Pinterest?” You can probably, most definitely, say “Yes”. After all, this is the theme of this post.
Okay wait, before I begin. I should preface by saying that the original theme of the shower was “vintage circus”. It turns out finding things to make your baby shower feel like a “vintage circus” is hard to do.
Let’s start with the food table:
My in laws happen to have a popcorn maker. Circus-y, no? I even flexed the old Adobe illustrator muscles and designed the food signs. They took way too long for what they were, but I’m a bit rusty. Either way – I think they turned out cute. The frame – we found at DI (and for those of you that don’t know Mormon/Utah-speak, Deseret Industries or DI is a thrift store owned by the LDS church. Like a Salvation Army.) We spray painted the frame “Dover White”. The popcorn cups are made from scrapbook paper.
Darling elephant sugar cookies. (I think Stephanie and my MIL did all the food – thank goodness too, because as you will see, Laura and I got a bit carried away with the decorations) Yes, that IS blue cotton candy in the vase back there. I had no idea you could just buy cotton candy, but I guess I never looked either. We got this stuff from Chuck E Cheese, of all places. And it was super good.
A little wider view of the table. Setting up a lovely food table is super helpful when your MIL already has really nice serving ware. Like that pretty water pitcher.
Random “serving” platter we found at DI. Really, I have no idea was it originally was. But it was brown, so we painted it, stuck some cute cupcakes on it, and a vase full of animal crackers on top AND wa-lah!
More foodie signs and painted DI frames…
The whole food table. Oh! And the flower-printed table runner? A $2.00 sheet, again from DI (cut and sewn). Don’t worry, we washed it. AND we sterilized everything else we got there too.
A close up of the pendant banner. I’ve seen these done a couple of ways. Jones herself made one. We chose the easy way out. Scrapbook paper, hole punch, and twine.
One of the eating/sitting tables. I will post details below…
Everything on the table was either thrifted from DI or was already on hand. I wish I taken a close up of the little dish in the center of the picture (the one with the peanuts in it). We had two of them and they were so cute. And cost maybe a $1.00 each. The runner going down the center of the table is a strip of vinyl table cloth with a stitch down the middle, then pulled to make it ruffle.
The other table. In the background you can see our streamer curtain – blowing in the wind. *Note: streamer curtains are probably best used for indoor decoration. It was very windy the day of the shower and the whole thing got pretty tangled up.
Laura found this random letter “G” at DI. So happens that the mom-to-be’s last name starts with the letter G and the baby is a girl. So there you go. We painted the G pink and then glued tissue paper to it. The large frame was actually a mirror we found at DI for $3.00. My brother in law sacrificed his hand a little bit getting the mirror part out for us (thanks Michael!). No pain, no gain -right?
Close up of the lovely little bench and streamer curtain, before the wind nearly destroyed it. This is where the mom-to-be opened her gifts.
And of course, the pom-poms. Pom-poms are easy, but kind of time consuming.
Most of the chairs we had to borrow from the church, but my MIL had a couple of her own and my SILs spray painted them as part of her mother’s day present. SO cute. We had to set them up. Just a heads up though, if you plan on doing this yourself be warned that you could easily use an entire can of spray paint for one chair (so this project can add up quickly). And once it dries you will need to spray some sort of varnish on top or the paint leaves bit of a powdery residue when you touch it.
Another pinterest find. Paint the inside of a vase so the outside still stays glossy. Turned out ok… the top didn’t look great but with the flowers, no one was the wiser.
Ok, I am lame because I thought I took a picture of the entire set up, but I didn’t. The picture below will have to do…
You can see more of the yard, including the two eating tables. And a tiny peek of the beautiful mountains. (Oh how I miss those mountains)
In case you’re wondering, it took over a week to acquire/make everything and we were still scrambling to get it all done before the shower started and we had a lot of help. At the end of it all I’ve decided that Pinterest is both a blessing and a curse. And how did we ever live without it?
-Emily
