A baby Shower for the Jones

Caren and Forrest are pregnant with their second child. We met them shortly after their daughter S was born and thus we didn't get to throw them a baby shower the first time around. Caren and Forrest decided that with this pregnancy they didn't want to find out the sex of the baby. They are foster parents and have baby items for both boys and girls so we decided to throw them an essentials baby shower.

This shower was a little harder than some of the showers that we have done in the past....we didn't know the babies gender. Caren and Forrest were not going to have a theme or color scheme for the nursery.

Christy had been looking for invitations and she found a really cute invitation at a local store. She went ahead and bought them because we needed to get the ball rolling on the baby shower because the shower was quickly approaching. The invitation had a green. brown, salmon, and light blue color scheme and a cute little onsie on it. So, we decided to use onsies and those colors at our shower.

Christy and i brainstormed about decorations and I searched the internet for inspiration. I found a cute idea where a girl had made cupcake picks that looked like onsies. I thought that they were really cute. the girl who had initially made the cupcake picks had used a onsie stamp. I did not have time to order a stamp on the internet. So, I just free handed them onto some white card stock. Christy told me that she would help me get decorations together for the shower, so I gave her the onsies to cut out and a stack of small green hearts that I had used a hole punch to make. She put the hearts on the cut out onsie and then added a tooth pick and piece of brown ribbon to finish the pick. We decided that it might be nice to have more than just onsie picks. So, I used a couple of hole punches that I had to make the second pick. I gave these to Christy. She put the squares together and then used a stamp and brown paint to stamp either a "J" or baby feet onto the small squares. These turned out pretty cute.



We also made little onsie shaped note cards for people to write a note to the parents/baby on. These were made from ute patterned scrapbooking paper and white card stock. We finished them off with a little brown ribbon. I saw this idea on Cathy Fillian's craft blog. She had done a series on how to decorate onsies and she had made these I think to be name tags.



Christy and I also thought that it would be nice to have a diaper cake since Diaper/wipes, and other essentials were the theme of the shower. I made a couple of cloth burp clothes that were within our color scheme. The cake was 3 tiers tall with the 4th tier being made out of a can covered in scrapbooking paper. We then used silk grass, a large onsie pick, and some flowers to decorate it.

Christy got some baby bottles and tied a a cute brown and green ribbon around them. We used those as vases on the table. I also made a banner to go on the front of the table.

Once we had figured out our decoration, we decided to focus on food. I made a couple of new recipes and a couple of old ones.



Our menu:

Ham and cheese sandwiches


Crab tartlets

Raspberry Key Lime tartlets

Croquembouche (I have been wanting to make one of these for a while. I cheated and used premade creampuffs)

Spinach and Artichoke dip
Chicken Salad, Crackers, and Cheese (Christy used cookie cutters to make the cheese really cute)
Fruit Salad
Pigs in a blanket
Cupcakes


I also made some Onsie shaped sugar cookies for people to take as favors from the shower. This was really my first attempt at sugar cookies and I wasn't sure how they would work out. I was really happy with the finished product, but they were a LOT of work!!



I think that everything turned out really cute and I was really happy with the whole shower. I just wish that I had known that Forrest's mom was allergic to crab. Good thing Forrest thought to ask before she took a bite of the Crab Tartlet on her plate. :(