Fall Baby Shower

January 6, 2014Mellu Leave a comment

Another baby shower that I helped with last fall was a fall themed shower. I used my Cricut a lot this time with the Flower Shoppe cartridge (one of my favorites) and made little flowers to set around in our fall-ish color scheme: plum, bronze, teal, brown, lite pink, and cream. We just did a few simple printed games for this shower and again I didn’t have to do food (in case you didn’t notice, it is my least favorite part of party planning).
The invitation.

Paper flower wreath for the front door.

Banner made with light and dark brown burlap strips and a variety of different ribbons and lace throughout.

Centerpiece (mini hay bales, flowers, acorns and leaf cutouts)

The food made by my friend was totally amazing and gourmet! YUM!

I had 2 party favors for the guest (mostly because I wasn’t sure if my caramel apples would turn out ok, but they ended up pretty yummy afterall.)

The little fall candles were from Bath and Body works and they even wrapped them all up for me and everything!

Strawberry Shortcake Party!

May 18, 2013Mellu 1 Comment

Welcome to Berry Bitty City!

Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry shortcake! The song is still in my head 3 weeks later! LOL This party turned out cute, but I wasn’t on top of things as I normally am (I have to start months early for the April birthdays since we have 2 of them and I ordered the stuff early, but didn’t get to the crafting part early enough) … so it was a little stressful at the end. But it all worked out and my daughter had a great time! We had about 16 kids or so this time. The kids arrived and started on a coloring sheet/maze activity, then we played some games, had some cake and she opened her presents.

Strawberries are cut from the Hello Kitty cricut cartridge.

My wonderful older daughters did all the coloring of the dots with some sharpie markers! We just taped on the leaves and stem. (warning… don’t let your kids play with these balloons when you take them down… the sharpie comes off everywhere… TRUST me!)

Strawberry confetti from birthday express, Table cloth from oriental trading. The maize printout and coloring sheets are from the strawberry shortcake website.

My grandma crocheted these Strawberry shortcake dolls for me when I was a kid and I still had them. They are amazing and worked great for centerpieces!

balloons from birthday express

This was a HUGE decoration that worked great for filling up a wall! And only $6 at birthday express

Images from google and bing image search. Again… make sure you go to advanced search and search only for images with a high resolution to look better with printing!

This piñata was an idea I found on Pinterest from Grey Luster girl. She is amazing at parties and had a lot of fun ideas!
I did make it into a pull string piñata because my girls prefer them. (my string broke this time though… which was a bummer). For instructions on making a pull string piñata see HERE

Strawberry Shortcake pin the strawberry on the vine game from Shindigz

Birthday girl!!

I made a bunch of these out of felt and we used them to play a musical chairs game. Most of the kids have never played that before and were not happy about me taking them away. LOL. But it was fun to watch them figure it out.

We had strawberry shortcake music in the background! You know… the ones that are still in my head! (there are a lot of different strawberry shortcake albums available… we liked the Strawberry Jams and Let’s Dance the best.)

For the food, we had strawberry applesause, Strawberries, dried strawberries, Chocolate wafers, Pretzel thins, homemade suckers, cupcakes, and beverages. Most things are from Trader Joes.

I love making candy! It is a pretty fast process if you have all the right tools. I bought this hard candy mold from sugarcraft. I also recommend getting the large candy funnel… Works great! THIS was a helpful blog when I first started to make candy (without my mom, that is)!

chocolate cupcakes

I made a simple buttercream frosting with powdered sugar and butter (but I only used about 1/2-2/3 as much sugar as the recipe called for) and I added strawberry flavoring to it. Oh man.. it was so yummy!

Remember these? I don’t think I ever did say how I made them… They are from the flower shoppe cricut cartridge… probably my most used cartridge! So many things you can use flowers for! Anyway, you use a fancy pearl pin to pin them to the Styrofoam ball topiary. (Be sure to store them out of the sun when you aren’t using them because the colors can fade)

Enjoying some goodies!

Ok… there were so many fun favors to do this time… I may have gotten a little carried away. It was still under $5 per kid though which is my max. 🙂

So, I bought THIS cricut cartridge just for this party and it made the 3D strawberries in the basket and the basket. So fun! Inside the 3D strawberries are strawberry daiquiri jelly bellies. And also in the basket there is a packet of strawberry flavored Annies fruit snacks and strawberry Kelloggs pastry crisps.

These mini hand sanitizers are from bath and body works and I tried to find the fruity scents and just make my own label for them in Photoshop, printed on sticky paper and stuck them on! 🙂

Also there are coloring books and bubble wands ($1 each at Michaels).

Girl baby shower

February 21, 2013Mellu Leave a comment

One more baby shower from a long time ago. It was nothing fancy and I just have a few pictures from this one. I will just post some pictures. 🙂

Invitations I had to hand cut these… in my pre-Cricut days.

This topiary was given to the new mommy for the nursery. The flowers are paper and they were made from my Cuttlebug die cut machine.

This fruit bowl wasn’t easy to do, but I love how it turned out!

Guess the baby game!

These were another gift to the momma-to-be. I had everyone put their addresses on envelopes and gave her these thank you cards for easy baby shower thank you notes!

Dr Seuss baby shower

May 21, 2012Mellu Leave a comment

Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Well, that happens to be my friend’s favorite children’s book, so it was easy to come up with a plan for what theme to do her baby shower. Mary and I went to work with the planning. I was so thankful that Mary decided to take care of all the food and I did the decorations and games because I am not a huge fan of the food part and that’s the part that always feels more stressful to me (due to its more last minute nature). Man, this was a fun shower to plan, with pretty much free rein of all those bright colors and the whimsical style of Dr. Seuss stuff, and all the ideas I found online. (I couldn’t do any pinterest pinning this time though, because I wanted the guest of honor to be surprised!, so I had to do thing the “old fashion” way… Bing and Google!) There was a lot of good ideas out there, so thank you everyone! It probably was one of my favorite showers to help create!

Here are the pictures!

These were inspired from the book Oh, the Places You’ll Go and I had some extra large cardboard in the garage, so I just cut out the shapes and spray painted them and duct taped them together in the back and a little to the house to keep them from falling down.

Tried to imitate the balloons from the book also. Colored the striped (after they were blown up) with permanent markers

The trees also inspired from the book. I made these by using 5 sheets of tissue paper, accordian folded them and wired them around the center (just like the regular tissue paper puffs), cut both outer edge into a point, Then I used a heavier wire from Home Depot cut it twice the length needed, took a balloon clip weight, put the wire through the hole to the middle of the wire and folded the wire in half. Then, with the ends of the wire toward the prepared tissue, I wrapped the thin wire around the tissue paper around the heavy wire to attach. Next, I took black duct tape and wrapped it around the heavy wire to hide it all the way down to the balloon clip. I did also have to wrap the taped wire around the balloon clip a little bit to make it strong enough to hold the flower up and then clipped it to the buckets (or anything you want). Last, I fluffed out the tissue paper, mostly just one on side, so the top stays mostly flat to look like the Dr Seuss trees. And voila!

I also loved the vases (idea I found online) wrapped with a blue boa and hot-glued the ends together.

Momma-to-be in all her glory!

Dr. Seuss phrases and characters for around the house! (Printed and cut out)

Everyone had fun doing this and there sure were some funny ones!

One of the games (203 was the answer by the way). Another game not shown was a crossword puzzle. You can create your own here. So, I did it fill-in-the-blank style based on the book, Oh The Places You’ll Go.

The 3rd game we played. Some may recognize from a previous shower I did. I had a lot of fun with Photoshop and took random baby faces and super-imposed them over celebrities and the guests needed to guess the celebrity.