I meant to blog about my sister's baby shower last week after it happened, but she ended up getting induced that Monday (3 weeks early), and since she was right in the middle of moving, as you might imagine I haven't stopped had time to look at the computer!
My sister picked out this adorable shabby chic crib set with a mobile that had little white bunnies in dresses. Inspired by the cute nursery, I decided to try to do a shabby chic, bunny baby shower.
Here's a picture of the room before many people arrived. This actually Sarah's church's community room. The guys emptied out all of the extra stuff so that it would look really nice for the shower. Some of the guests who go to the church couldn't believe it was the same room.
The banner was simple to make, I just took some leftover scrapbook paper I had and cut out triangles and letters, then white circles to set off the letters. Then I just threaded some ribbon through holes I made with the hole-puncher, and put a little tape on the back to keep the ribbon spaced out when it was hung up.
You can't really see the centerpiece in this picture, but I got a case of 1 quart mason jars and painted some off-white, some sage green, and some aqua blue. Then I took a tooth brush and splattered a contrasting color on the jars. Finally I decoupaged on an image of a rose that I found online (very shabby chic), and finished it off with some dark brown ribbon. For the flowers I just went to Shop Rite and got some pink roses, white spider mums (they had to give me some other large flowers because all of the spider mums I'd ordered didn't come in), ferny greens and baby's breath. Then Trouwbottom came the night before to arrange them. (Did you know Trouwbottom was raised in a flower shop? True story.
For the food we decided to go with brunch to keep it simple. My brother-in-law's mom did the fruit. I cut up cheese and got muffins and danishes from Costco. I ordered shrimp and sandwiches, my mom and Sarah made some egg/cheese/sausage casseroles from a Paula Dean cookbook (yum!), and my mom cooked up some frozen tater tots.
I found a good video tutorial on how to fold these bunny napkins online. I made the napkin rings out of some ribbon and little puff balls from Michaels.
I ordered the chair covers from tableclothfactory online as well as the tablecloths and napkins. For the sashes, we used some rolls of that tulle you get at the party store and just added a small tissue paper flower. This picture is of probably the last chair I did, because the flower is smooshed and I was running out of tulle, the rest had a big loose bow of tulle. To make this size flower, I cut the tissue paper sheets in half, then the halves in thirds to make 6 small sheets from every 1 big sheet. Each flower is 5 sheets thick.
For the tissue puffs that we hung from the ceiling, I used whole and half sheets, and pink, brown, white, aqua blue, yellow, and polka dot tissue paper. We hung 3 over each table. To tie the flowers I used wire, and then added the ribbon to hang them before we fluffed them up. It really helped that we waited to fluff them until the day before.
Trouwbottom's whole family came to help out!
Here's the room with everyone starting to fill it up. I'm not sure how many people showed up, but 77 RSVP'd!
My mom made the chocolate bunny pops from some Easter molds I found online. The pencils were from Oriental Trading Co. and were for the games, although because there were so many people we ended up playing the timer game (set a timer and when it goes off whoever's gift the mom is opening gets a prize), to make it simpler. So the pencils were just an extra favor.
A bad picture of the cake, which was actually really nice and tasted sooo good. Chocolate raspberry, from Wegmans. I also ordered Italian pasteries, which were a big hit.
My sister's high school English teacher and good friend gave a great talk about using your words to uplift and encourage instead of tearing people down. Great advice for busy moms!
Henry was very tired but managed to stay awake and in a good mood for almost the whole shower.
