I know I’m probably close to baby showering you out, but for the sake of posterity, I have to share a few things that we worked on for Jake’s baby shower :)

The easiest was a little circular banner with Jake’s name on it.  It was originally intended for our pregnancy photo shoot, but it was a little windy that day so they were flapping all over the place and didn’t quite work out the way I had envisioned.  It still came in handy by being a decor piece for the baby shower:

I worked on the simple parts of tracing and cutting out the circles, and Jeff did the more artistic part of filling out the letters, then I strung them together.  Pretty nice and simple, but I think it added a nice touch (can you tell we’re a little obsessed with his name?).

Next up: little triangle banners I’ve been wanting to make for a special occasion for a while.  I never thought to use fabric instead of paper, but I saw this done at another friend’s baby shower and thought I would give it a shot.

This project was a little lot more time consuming.  I had to measure out each triangle, cut it out, then put together after I had a good bunch cut out.  The individual triangles were 4.75 inches wide at the top, and 6 inches long, with about a half an inch at the top to fold over the twine.  I used a hot glue gun to attach to the twine, but did suffer a couple serious burns while folding the flap over the glue…so you know…be cautious!  I left about an inch and a half in between each triangle.

I decided to make several (4) small banners instead of one big, long one, and that worked out perfectly.  We ended up putting one at the entrance of the house in the front yard, one around the food table, one where the presents were, and one in the backyard (that last one is actually still hanging…oops).  I was quite happy with the finished product (although I am glad I did these almost two months ahead of time):

Finally, one of my favorites!  I wanted a guest gift that was semi-practical: something people might actually want to keep around for a little bit.  I remember one bridal shower I went to where the guest gifts were little Lady Palm plants–Jeff and I actually planted it and took care of it for a good 3, almost 4, years…and then we eventually killed it (it’s still a sensitive issue for both of us, we really loved our Lady Palm).  (Side note: I really hope we’re better with children than we are with plants.)  So I thought something along those lines…and figured succulents would be a good idea.  They’re kinda Western with the whole dessert plant thing, so it tied in with our cow boy theme, and they’re quite popular right now, so we figured people would like them.

First we collected a bunch of cans.  We tried to make them all different sizes and shapes, but as you can tell below, one size was pretty dominant, haha.  Jeff, with the help of his nephew, Brayden, poked holes on the bottom of the cans for drainage.

Our friend Sarah was kind enough to buy us all sorts of adorable succulents:

I tried to size some of them up with the appropriate size can so they would be fairly evenly matched, using the wider cans for wider succulents and such.

When I researched online how to plant these little suckers, it said you should mix soil with some kind of sediment/sand to improve drainage.  Jeff and I went to Home Depot to buy some and couldn’t find anything that was the right texture.  But we did find this:

EVEN BETTER!  It was pretty affordable, so we went with it.

At this point I realized that I wanted to use some rocks to cover the soil, mostly for aesthetic reasons, but then when I watered them I realized it would be a good idea to put them on there as soil cover as well.

In the end, I think this was one of the best ideas for this little project, because it made them about 95% more cool (yep, that’s a real statistic…I ran studies on it…).

For the final touch, Jeff designed a little logo with Jake’s initials (again, obsessed!), and the date of our shower.   I guess this could be confused by people thinking it’s his birthdate, but being as that’s still unknown, I thought this would work.  After that, we punched a couples holes on each side of the logo, ran some twine around, and voila!

I love them!  We used them to decorate different areas of the house, mostly in the backyard, by grouping them in pairs or threes.  As people left we reminded them to take one home, and I think most people were pretty happy with their little succulent plant :)

I think they even got some Instagram love from a couple guests, so I know they found a loving home :)

Ok, I think that’s all I got for baby shower craftiness madness.  Thanks for listening reading!