She's Ready to Pop!

My youngest sister is Ready to Pop! Rachel is due any day with her first baby and I can't wait to meet little Andrew! This weekend, I threw her a baby shower using the "Ready to Pop" theme and I had soooo much fun with it! I started out with a color scheme of lime green and bright blue and then added the "Pop" theme. Everything from the food to the decorations went with the theme and I was also able to reuse some of the things from the "Bright and Cheerful Baby Shower" that I posted previously. Be prepared, this post is probably going to be loaded with pictures. And again, all pictures were taken by my super talented, soon-to-be 13 year old daughter. :)

Butter, Caramel and White Cheddar Popcorn complete with DIY labels. All of the frames containing labels came from WalMart and were 97 cents!!!

I reused the backdrop from the previous shower, made a "Ready to Pop" banner and added some tissue poms to make it work for this shower. I also reused the little boy quotes from the previous shower.

I found this POP-up book (Get it? POP-up to go with the theme.) that also worked perfectly with the color scheme and used it as a guest book.

I snagged some tree branches from my brother's yard, spray painted them white and hung these Wishes for Baby cards off of them using fishing line. Can't remember where I found these, but they were free printables! I already had the mason jars and the spray paint and the blue marbles were a loan from a friend, so all the centerpieces cost was the paper and ink for the cards! Awesome!

Bubble gum favors with "Thanks for POPping by" labels.

One of Rachel's favorite drinks, Jones soda POP with lables removed (it went perfectly with the color scheme!). I also served water with scrapbook paper labels (thanks goes to my brother-in-law Derrick for helping out with those). :)

I made the cake topper using lollipop sticks and some scrapbooking embellishments. Easy, cute and inexpensive!

I love these popcorn boxes!!! I found them at Party City. Aren't they adorable?!!

I alternated different plates, cups and forks to add some interest to the tabletop. I also put a green runner over the white tablecloth for more color.

Last, but not least, we had a POP Quiz! I really am not big on shower games, but I thought this one was fun. :-) I hope you enjoyed this shower as much as I did! Leave me a comment to let me know what you thought! See you soon! Jamie

Bright and Cheerful Baby Shower

Parties, parties and more parties!!! Yay!!! Today, I had a part in throwing a baby shower for an amazing co-worker/friend. This girl is awesome and I am so glad I got to have a hand in her special day. Ok,are you ready for all the juicy details?!! So, my girl Jill is due to have her second child in February. She has a beautiful 3 year old daughter and is pregnant with a boy. We've talked all throughout her pregnancy about the nursery and how she will be decorating it. She decided on a modern room she found on Pinterest (where else?) with a color scheme of aqua, lime green and orange. Doesn't that sound fun?!! So of course, I decided to do the shower in those bright and cheerful colors. This is without a doubt the most fun color scheme I've ever done. I started out by choosing the plates, napkins, cups and forks. I love mixing and matching the plates by shape and alternating solid and patterned napkins, so that's exactly what I did. Aqua polka dot napkins paired with solid orange napkins added a little bit of fun to the party, while a mixture of square and round plates in all three colors made things a bit more interesting.

I also bought some different patterns and colors of tissue paper to make tissue poms. A green chevron, a blue and white polka dot and a solid orange. These poms didn't turn out exactly as I had planned and I didn't get any good pictures of them, but maybe I'll have better luck next time. :-)

I really wanted to do a backdrop for the gift table even though I have never done one before. I decided to give it a try and I love how it turned out! All I did was take a piece of foam board from the lumber yard and have my handy dandy hubby cut it down to 4 foot by 4 foot. Then I took a plastic tablecloth and wrapped it around the foam and stapled it to the back. Little tip, get a friend to help you with this part. Thank goodness for my girl Andrea! I had printed out a banner that said "Gifts for Kale" and I used double sided tape to attatch it to the backdrop. A few tissue poms later and I had a pretty little backdrop for the gift table. I really, really liked it.

Something else I really liked, the framed quotes about little boys. They were just a fun little extra that made the shower just a bit more special.

Last, but not least, possibly my favorite part of the shower. I took a multi-opening frame, filled each frame with scrapbook paper and hot glued letters in some of the frames to spell out the baby's name. Then, I had guests sign the scrapbook paper in the empty frames as a sort of guest book. My hope is that it will hang in baby Kale's room and that he will look at it and see how much he was loved before he was even born.

I can't say how grateful I am to the ladies I work with for letting me plan this shower. It really meant a lot to me! Well, that's all for this post, but check back soon for another baby shower post! Yay!!! See you soon, Jamie P.S. Aren't the pictures in this post sooo much better? Guess who took them? My 12 year old daughter!!! Pretty sure she'll be doing all of my pics from now on! :-)

Tissue Poms and an Upcoming Party!

Hey girls (and guys, if there are any reading this post (-;)! I am super excited to be finishing up work on a baby shower this week and hopefully by next week, I will have some pictures to post for you! I also have another baby shower coming up in a couple of weeks, so it is going to a busy, busy month here and I couldn't be happier. Today, I have a little tutorial for you on how to make the ever popular tissue poms. As far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't be a party without them. :-) I know there are TONS of tutorials out in blogland for these and I'm sure that there are plenty with much better pictures than mine, but I decided to do it anyways. By the way, I'm working on upgrading my picture quality, so be patient with me, please. :-) Anyways, on to the tutorial! First, you start with at least 8 sheets of tissue paper. The more sheets you have, the fuller your pom will be.

If one side is longer than the other, start accordian folding the shortest side. My sides were the same length, so it didn't really matter where I started folding.

When you are finished folding, find the center of your tissue paper and tie some wire, string, ribbon, etc. around it tightly. I forgot to do this next step, so there are no pics for it, but at this point, you may want to trim the ends of your paper. You can either round them or give them a pointed tip depending on the look you're going for. You'll see in the final pictures that I gave all of mine (except this one) rounded tips.

Now all that's left to do is to gently pull the layers of tissue paper apart and fluff into the shape you want. This one didn't turn out great, but the ones that I remembered to trim the tips of turned out pretty ok.

So now you've gotten a sneak peek at the shower that I'm working on this week. Hope you'll come back for more! See you soon, Jamie

Winter White Christmas Tree

Hey there! So, I put my tree up over the Thanksgiving holiday, but I didn't decorate it right away. I'm not one of those people who has the same ornaments every year. I like to have a different theme or color scheme each year, but this year, I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. So, there sat my poor, empty, puny tree. For 3 days. I was beginning to hate it. It was too bare, too short, too...green? I was losing my mind! Trees are supposed to be green, right? Not in my mind, not this year. I was dreaming of a beautiful, full, flocked tree. You know, the kind that looks like it has snow on the branches? I looked online and found several I liked. The least expensive one? $230.00 The most expensive one I liked? $990.00!!! Now, I know that $230.00 might not sound like much to some people, but to me, right before the holidays,not happening. So of course, I went to Pinterest in search of inspiration. Somewhere in all my Pinterest and Google searching, I came across a couple of people who had painted their trees. What's that, painted their Christmas trees? Now you're thinking I have really lost my mind. What did I have to lose? I already hated the tree and had complained about it so much that my dear husband was threatening to haul it to the dump. So, with my handy dandy foam brush in hand, some glitter for sparkle and some linen colored craft paint, I got to work dabbing paint on the tips of the branches and then sprinkling them with glitter. Then I decided to go a little bit deeper into the tree. The whole process took me about an hour and when I finished.... there wasn't much of a difference. You thought I was going to say it looked great, didn't you? I'm not sure what I did wrong. But, I set there a few more hours and then decided to just go ahead and pull out the first ornaments I saw in the Christmas closet and decorate the tree. What I came up with were just plain white ornaments and some burlap garland

Guess what? I actually kind of like it! Now, I'm sure that I will be hitting some after-Christmas sales looking for a good deal on a big, beautiful tree, but for now, I am satisfied. :-)

Wreath Update

Hey guys!  I have a teensy tiny little update to my wreath that I wanted to show you.  Remember how I said I felt like it was still missing something?  I added something to it that finishes it off... I think.
:-)  See the sparkly floral spray by the brown roses? I'm still not sure I'm finished though. ;-) Let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions. 
See you soon, Jamie

Winter Wreath

Ok.  Here goes.  My first official project post!!! So excited!  I will apologize ahead of time for the poor quality of the photos.  I promise, it will get better! The project I'm going to show you guys today is definitely not my best work, but I do like how it turned out.  I started out with a floral foam wreath form ( I know, I know, not neccesarily the most inexpensive choice, but it was all my tiny little Walmart had to offer).  I've had the yarn for a while now and wasn't sure what to do with it (don't ask me why I had yarn when I don't know how to crochet, knit or do anything else that requires yarn). :-/  Luckily, it was perfect for this project. 

 Let me tell you, wrapping the wreath with yarn is a lengthy process!  Turn on HGTV and get comfy!  Oh, by the way, if you have a very helpful 8 year old, DO NOT leave your wreath unattended to run to get dinner for everyone!  I wish I had taken a picture.  He really was trying to help, but it took me forever to untangle that mess! 

 

The next thing I did was add some pinecones that I had picked up in the Christmas section at (you guessed it) Walmart.  I also added some flowers that I had in my craft stash, but it still needed something....

 

I tried adding a letter for our last name

but I didn't like it.

 

So, I took it off and after several Google and Pinterest searches (and some serious hot glue gun burns) I made these little cuties out of some brown felt I had laying around.

Are you ready to see the finished product?!!?

I still think it might be missing something...  What do you think?  If you have any ideas, please leave me a comment below.  Thanks for stopping by!

See you soon,

Jamie 

 





My first post!

I finally decided to start a blog! My goal for this blog is simple...plan spectacular parties, come up with genius craft ideas, become more organized than Martha Stewart, write about it all and become rich and famous for it. Simple right?!! Ok, so maybe it won't happen exactly like that. ;-) How about this instead? Plan moderately priced (but still spectacular) parties that will leave my friends and blog followers in awe of me, attempt various crafts and show you how wildly successful I am (and possibly show you some epic failures as well) and attempt to organize something other than my binders (you will be hearing a LOT about my binders). Basically, my hope for this blog is that it will be a record of the creative things that I attempt, even if they don't always turn out exactly how I plan. ;-) Here's hoping that this is the first of many posts!

See you soon!