On this Crafting Monday, my husband and I painted blinds (The blinds in our house were blue...blue!!!!), I spray painted some bottles while in the process of
creating some fun decor, saved some Cilantro following the same method I harvested basil in this
last blog, and I washed the dog and reapplied his Canine Advantix flea medication...stuff. Phew! So while on a roll, I figure I'd bust out a blog:
I helped host a fall baby shower last October. Normally when you think of baby showers, you think of baby ducks and/or pink or blue parties. We did not know the gender of the baby, so we had to work with gender neutral colors. Also, baby ducks are born in the spring, so that theme I will have to wait to use. We finally picked the theme of "Boo! It's a Baby", and we decorated with pumpkins and cute Halloween decor, using orange (a major no-no for us Aggies, except when associated with fall pumpkins), purple and green.
A friend helped me with the invites that I printed off at Target, and I my friends helped me research baby shower games. Note to self: throw the first shower for expectant mothers, that way you don't worry about re-using games! I decided on 3 games:
1. Guess the baby food-I bought 6 jars and removed the labels and had the guests guess just by color and appearance! Having 2 orange colores jars but neither being carrots threw everybody off! Not surprisingly, my cousins who have the youngest children did the best on this game!
2. TV Show Children- Another mental game where guests had to remember the number of and names of children for a list of TV show families! Fun, and a good game for multi-generations when you throw in older and newer tv shows!
3. Baby Items ABC's- guests filled in the alphabet with baby items. For example: B=bibs, C=crib, D=diapers. This was fun to see how creative people were! The soon-to-be mother won this game; she must have been doing her baby homework!!
I've had to divide this shower into three parts, because I did three main decorative items and want to be in-depth about all! So part 1: The Baby Shower Wreath
I found lots of online ideas for baby shower wreaths, some made
completely of diapers, others made completely of pink flowers; some for indoor use, some for outdoor use. After compiling ideas and doing some research, I finalized my plan! Since I'm a bit thrifty right now, I created a wreath base that would be used for fall decor once baby items were removed. Then I added on the Baby items!!
The total cost of the wreath was minimal, as I like to keep a lookout for seasonal flowers on sale. The baby items, including socks, onsies, pacifiers, toys, and travel sized lotions, etc.. All came from Walmart and weren't that expensive. I used half of those items from packages in the wreath and the other half in the diaper cake I'll share in part 2.
Of course I had some help in the creation of the wreath.... Sock thief Rocky just loved how the small socks fit perfectly in his mouth. (Don't worry, these were washed before baby wore them.) After the wreath was made, he managed to steal a sparkly pumpkin off the wreath, too, which I didn't photograph, but later found an online picture from someone else who also had a problematic pumpkin thief lab pup! How cute is this?!
I LOVE making wreaths and definitely plan to make this a tradition going forward! After all, I'm running out of places to store all of my wreaths... I can't make more for myself! Here's the final Fall Wreath for my door after the shower:
I'll be sure to post the final bottle crafts when they get done!
~RR
"It's up to you to seize your destiny"
Essentialy, roll and rubber band diapers, then start arranging layers. Rubber band all layers together, weasel the straws into the layers for keeping all layers together, then cut cardboard to fit bottom layer and magically get this below base layer. (Yes, this is what we did, or you could start with cutting a cardboard circle and build the layers by size according to this. But let's be honest, does anyone actually follow logical steps?) 
