Baby Bouquet!

I hosted a baby shower over the weekend. My church is indefatigable in its baby-and-bridal-shower-throwing. Every engaged lady and every pregnant woman (for every kid) gets a shower. It's pretty awesome, actually. This was my first time as the main hostess at one of these shindigs, although I've co-hosted before. Besides the contributions of my organizational and watermelon-bowl-making skills, I also made the hostess gift.

The first idea was for me to make our friend a diaper cake. But then we remembered that she uses cloth diapers, and making a diaper cake out of cloth diaper stuff would be really expensive. So I thought, well what if I make a diaper cake with clothing and washcloths and stuff instead of diapers? But then as I searched around the interwebs to see if people had done this before, I came across this lady's Etsy shop. Cuteness!! I knew I had to attempt this. Because not only was this the hostess gift, it was also supposed to double as a party decoration.

I'll be honest -- it was looking really bad for a really long time. I just kept rolling and stuffing and folding, and it just wasn't working. So I took a break and when I came back to it the next day, it went much better. And I think it turned out really well!

[Eh? Pretty good for an amateur.]

In case you're wondering, I rolled up some receiving blankets really tightly, tied them with ribbon, and put them standing up in the bottom of the pot. I stuck the sticks (dowel rods) in the blankets to get the sticks to stand up. But before I did that I wrapped the sticks in green tissue paper with Elmer's glue and let them dry. (I think the green "stems" make all the difference for the arrangement, actually.) I folded and rolled things (socks, onesies, washcloths, and pants) in various ways and pinned them together. Then I just stuck the sticks up the inside of them. I filled in the gaps in the bottom of the pot with some tissue paper, and voila!

Is There a Doctor in the House??

Why yes, yes there is!

Last Tuesday, the man of the house defended his dissertation, which, aside from some paperwork, makes him officially a Doctor of Philosophy in the area of Economics. Woohoo! It's been a semi-long 5 years. I'm so proud of him. He's worked hard, and he's the first in his extended family to hold any kind of advanced degree (as far as anyone can remember).

So of course this occasion called for crafting! I had a vague idea that I needed to make him a t-shirt (my go-to gift of choice for him) that had something to do with the current incarnation of the Doctor from Doctor Who. In my head, it had a bow tie, suspenders, and the words "Trust me, I'm a Doctor" on the front (all stenciled on).

Well then I went to Hobby Lobby to find a tan/khaki t-shirt (which is approximately the color of the 11th Doctor's shirt). They don't carry them! Frustration. So then I had to drive to WalMart. They didn't have any tan or khaki ones loose, so I settled for like a dark heather tan in a package with 3 other shirts. In my frustration and haste, I failed to notice that they all had pockets until I got home. That threw a major kink in the suspenders part of the plan. But I quickly recovered when I realized I could make do by stenciling a sonic screwdriver into the pocket! I also decided to move the lettering to the back.

But that necessitated another trip to Hobby Lobby to buy metallic fabric paint for the screwdriver, and it required me to somehow come up with a decent, tri-color sonic screwdriver stencil. And I'm really not artistic like that. I have no sense of perspective in 2-D. It's really bad. I eventually did the best I could by trying to keep it as simple as possible.

Photos!

[You can't really see the sonic screwdriver very well. That's just as well, really. But it does glow in the dark!]

[The back!]