Blue and Brown Baby Shower

I meant to blog for the Show Us Your Life series over at Kelly's Korner on Friday, but it turned out to be a busier day than I thought and then the weekend was here...and I was at the beach:) Then I figured posting about Baby Showers today would be better than never, hope you don't mind. And in case any of you are looking for baby shower ideas, head over Show Us Your Life: Baby Showers to see hundreds of participants!

I have a bunch of friends with children, but only have ever been involved in the planning of one baby shower...the one for my amazing friend Kia (her sweet little guy is now 9 months old)! I was in charge of decorations, while other friends and Kia's mom handled the food, games, favors, etc., so for this I'll just talk about what I did for "decor".

The mom-to-be didn't want the shower to be a surprise, nor did she want it to be too "themey". However as you know, when you are having any sort of occasion or party, there always tends to be something that connects the various parts of the event, so for this we went with the color palette of blue and brown, which was the same that Kia was using to decorate the nursery with. We also decided to very subtly include a baby bird/nest vibe without hopefully hitting anyone over the head with it.

My first thought, as it often is with entertaining, was fresh flowers. I mean, you really can't go wrong with floral centerpieces or accents for any sort of occasion. Plus they are a great way to bring in more of your color palette. Blue and white flowers were the obvious choice. To make things a bit more fun, I used the same treatment for the containers that I did for our wedding reception...I collected various sized and patterned ribbons in blue, brown and white and hot glued them around the middle of the clear glass vases. The hydrangeas that we used made a quite a trek to attend this special baby shower...a friend I work with brought them in on public transportation to our office from her backyard! Then I drove 6 hours with them in my car (stems in a bucket of water) back to my parents' where I was staying for the weekend for the shower (Kia is one of my best friends from growing up in Pa). They were definitely worth it though:)

My second thought, again a no-brainer for entertaining, was candles. We put small glass votives with white candles everywhere. Even the shower was during the daytime, they lent a nice intimate and classy glow to the party!




For the baby bird part of the non-themed theme, I bought a bunch of small nests at Michaels. I already had these solid painted eggs (an Easter gift from my Mom), but took a couple of the ones I didn't like all that much (they were purple) and repainted them to look like speckly blue-jay eggs. Then just placed the nests with eggs randomly around for a cute and woodsy feel.

Another idea I had was to use paper (something I had a lot of lying around) and pattern to help tie everything together and further enhance our color scheme. I made this "Congratulations" banner out of round pieces of blue and brown scrapbook paper glued onto chocolate satin ribbon. (I sprung for one of the circle die-cut things at Michaels - it was an investment! - to use for the larger patterned circles. The chocolate brown letters were printed on white paper and cut out by hand.)


I can not take credit for this fabulous circle banner idea...I "borrowed" it from my friend Katie of Good Things Catered (this girl is queen of entertaining, if you haven't checked out her blog, you must), although I can't find the shot of her banner that was my original inspiration. But seriously, you can use this idea for anything...in fact, now that I own the circle cutter, I plan to make a lot of banners! Check out the one I made last year for Thanksgiving that says "Give thanks" (Happy Thanksgiving was way too many letters!):



And back to babies....to mesh the baby bird thing with the patterned paper idea, I made 2 strings of "paper birds". Sort of like paper dolls but instead of all connected by the arms, I made them individually and hung them from jute twine with mini wood clothespins. I found 3 or 4 different birds online (clip art or google images), sized them appropriately and then printed them out on heavy cardstock to form templates/stencils. Then used these to cut out a bunch of bird silhouettes from more of the blue and brown scrapbook paper. The one thing I was unhappy with was that I had no idea where in Kia's mom's house we would use these "paper birds" when I made them. As it turns out, we hung them on either side of a door frame that connected 2 of the rooms we were having the shower in. So you were able to see the backside of each bird which was white from the back of the scrapbook paper...I wish they were patterned on both sides:(

{and in this case, one of the scrapbook papers had green on the backside..oops...something to keep in mind for next time}

The last thing I did was collect from Kia's mom photos of Kia and her husband (the dad-to-be) when they were babies/kids and pics of them together as a couple. I scanned these in and then printed them out in black and white. Mounted them on blue card stock and hung them by twine from a huge branch centerpiece I had made. (A gigantic glass hurricane vase filled with stones at the bottom to hold up the branches I had found in my back yard.) It made a nice dramatic statement, was a great ice breaker, and a fun way to try and visualize what the new baby might look like. We even had 2 pictures of Kia's mom's baby shower from when she was pregnant with Kia on there!!

Thus ends the baby shower edition of this blog:) So, if you were going to make a circle banner tomorrow, what would yours say?!