jungle baby shower

In January, my friend, Andrea, and I collaborated on a baby shower for our sweet friends, Denis & Marie.  We were lucky enough to have a third friend cater all of the food (so. delish.) and lucky that D&M have an awesome house for hosting parties!

We made the invites with a little help from my mom’s cricut (thanks mom!).  We designed & printed the invite in photoshop, then glued it to an animal print paper (each invite had a different animal-themed paper, thanks to a small pad of animal paper that I bought at JoAnn’s).  Then, the monkey, heart, & leaf were glued on top.

I also got to try my hand at a diaper cake!  I’ve always wanted to make one…  Although, this was almost the cake that wasn’t.  As a cloth diaperer, I’ve been pretty aloof about diaper prices, and when I realized that the 150-pack of diapers (might last a newborn, what, 20 days?) was going to be $50, I just about skipped it altogether.  Why are diapers so expensive?  (note that I’ve spent about $300 on cloth diapers that I hope will last through Lilly and all of our future children, too!)  Anyways, after 20 minutes of fretting, I found a $7 off coupon and went for it.  And I’m glad I did!  The cake really turned out nicely!

We hid a bottle of wine on the inside to stabilize it, and I sewed two pieces of fleece together to make a double-layer receiving blanket to wrap around a cardboard circle as the base.  We found all sorts of fun samples and toys to attach to the cake, and topped it with a silly stuffed lion.

I pulled out some animal print fabric to use for table cloths (strangely, I had them in my stash?), and we decorated a small jar with a monkey face and asked guests to write advice/encouragement for the new parents and stick it in the jar.  Andrea found some awesome animal-themed quizzes online that we used as a fun way to break up all of the gift opening (there was so much gift opening!  we were so glad that everyone was so generous, and I am sure that the new parents appreciated it!).

Aren’t they adorable?

Another fun craft project I tackled for the shower was this clothesline of animal onesies. I picked up a 4-pack of plain onesies and some fusible webbing and then ironed fabric cut into animal shapes onto the front of the onesies. It turned out even better than I imagined!  (I want to make a million of these for Lilly now!)

Using the cricut, I also cut out a bunch of large monkey faces and taped them to a piece of twine and hung the banner above the food/drink tables. Unfortunately, the only picture I have of it is here (look in the background, in front of the windows), and thank goodness Andrea looks as cute as she does or I’m not sure she’d like me posting this picture of her:

And, Denis (our awesome photog friend) did a photo shoot of each of the guests with the mama-to-be in their in-home studio. So much fun! And it was awesome to get a print out of the photos in the thank you note that they sent!

More pictures of the day:

Mmm… those sweets are sort of making my mouth water.

Overall, it was a really great day, and I was so glad that we were able to celebrate/support some of our friends in their journey to becoming parents!  Their sweet little girl showed up a month ago — 5 weeks early! — and she is just beautiful.  We look forward to watching our little girls grow up together (and become BFFs!).