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!