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