Debi’s Baby Shower

Since we hand crafted a few pieces of the baby shower I thought we could share that with you as well. Here is radiant mama-to-be Debi sitting below another round of pennants I made for this baby shower.  In last minute haste I crafted this one with scraps of extra fabric, paper and a marker. It shows a matching pennant with the simple words printed “congratulations.”

Gina picked up a bundle of fresh flowers and had them so lovingly decorated around her house.  Here you can see them with the cds Krista, our other co-host, put together. We requested that each of the Park Girls suggest their favorite children’s song or lullabye. We made cds of each song.  Fred, the microsoft word wizard used an image from a t-shirt we had made WAY back in college for the front of our Park Girls Lullabies cd. Cute, huh?

Gina had more flowers in  the kitchen where first feasted on a delicious taco bar and then wandered over towards dessert.

You can see in the background some great pinwheels that Gina made with paper and scraps of fabric I had leftover from the pennants. The pinwheels also hid the pennant ends in the living room where we hung them with blue painters tape!

The dessert you see above is this amazing pumpkin fluff with gingersnaps and graham crackers to dip!

I was definitely feeling fall. In addition to pumpkin fluff I made this Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake. Along with the cheery mints, I think this looked quite festive!

Now that Gina is expecting it is good to review this as we plan to throw her a shower in a few short months! Do you have any favorite baby shower activities or foods you like to serve?

Nursery Room Art

Gina, another friend Krista, and I hosted a baby shower back in November (or was it October!?!) for our dear friend Debi.  She was due right before Christmas with a little one, but the gender was to be a surprise.  Debi asked us to reign in the creative minds of the “Park Girls” (the name we call ourselves-we all met our freshman year of college when D was our Resident Assistant) to create some art for the nursery.  She mentioned maps and we started pinning up a storm.  This photo on Pinterest became our inspiration. Now that her little girl Audra has made her appearance we thought it time to post about the Park Girls nursery art.

Gina found silhouettes of animals on the internet which she printed off. We cut these out and then began tracing them onto maps. Not just any maps, oh no! Gina had contacted Debi’s hubby to find out the places special to them so we made sure to have those printed off for use. We had a U.S.Road Atlas on hand as well.

Some of the animals were more complicated than others. Our friend Anne, above,  made a beautiful but complicated Dolphin using several different maps.

Gina’s hippo utilized two different maps. If you look closely you can see the North Shore of Minnesota!

We mounted each of the animals on white cardstock cut to size for some cheap IKEA frames (free to us since they were left overs from a project my mom never completed and handed over to me). We weren’t sure if Debi would like the wood look, so our offer still stands to paint them as she wishes.

Here they are all complete!

Aren’t they spectacular?  Because I can’t get enough of them I’ll give you close ups of each one we made at the shower that you haven’t seen above.

Dog

Sheep

Hippo

Frog

Donkey

Dolphin

Giraffe

Elephant

This last big guy, the elephant, was one of two that I made. I had to hold myself back from sneaking him out of the stack to find his way home with me!

Anniversary Ornament

I know, I know, posting holiday ornaments in the middle of November doesn’t seem quite right, but this is actually a Happy Anniversary Ornament!  My dear friend J married B a year ago.  Their first anniversary was just last week so this is a Happy Anniversary gift for them.  I’ve had their wedding invitation hanging around for a while knowing I wanted to do something for them with it. This example of an ornament I found on pinterest had me digging in my craft supplies for the glass bulbs I knew I still had from a failed ornament project of long ago!

Joayne and Ben’s invites were a bright burst of color.

I pulled them apart and cut out their names, wedding location and other important details that were all included in the wedding invite.  I then cut the paper into pieces that would easily fit into the clear glass globe I had left over from another project. I was using card stock which wouldn’t curl easily like the Pinterest example above, so I left it in straight small pieces.

I soon realized that the pieces of color were too big and weren’t highlighting the special words I cut out of their invitation to show.  So I cut the colored pieces into confetti.

And this seemed to do the trick. Here is the final product. Happy Anniversary J & B!