I’ve finally started sorting through all the photos from the Little Lamb baby shower I co-hosted a few weeks ago, and will be posting them soon. Meanwhile, I thought I’d share a bit about how I planned the party.
The first thing I did was to get some help! Parties are a lot of work, so I leaned heavily on friends and my mom to help pull it all together (thanks, everyone!) First things first: we established a date, budget, general theme, and set a cap on the guest list (ours was 18). We chose a date a few months out, to give us plenty of time to plan; we all pitched in some cash at the beginning to one person (me) so that I could be in charge of buying all the décor, invites, flowers, etc. And we chose the “little lamb” theme and spring green colors because we knew that was the theme of the baby’s nursery décor.
My biggest tip for planning a little party is to shop your own home (and your friends’ homes) first, before buying a single thing! Luckily Carrie’s nursery décor happens to be my own favorite color, green, so I had lots of “decorations” around already.
Use your own talents, and those of your friends, to help save money. Since I’m a stationery designer I, naturally, designed the invites. My mom, who has a gift for floral arranging, offered to handle the flowers, someone else offered to do all the baking, and so on. This saved us a lot of cash!
custom invitations by delphine
While I’m a huge fan of letterpress (duh), we went with low-cost digital printing for the invites. For about the cost of just a letterpress invititation, we were able to digitally print double sided invitations, registry inserts, thank you cards for favors for guests, thank you cards for Carrie, place cards, table cards, place cards, and sticker labels.
A preview of the dessert table.
The yellow flowers arrangements are actually plants (about $5 each at Home Depot). Mom lined the inside of big glass vases with citron colored paper, and placed lemons from the back yard on top of the pots. I grouped three paper balls leftover from my son’s birthday party under the chandelier (they store flat, and they were less than $3 each … they’re on their third party already!). I made the “BABY” banner with leftover cards from the invitation press run and a spool of ribbon from the dollar bin at Michael’s. Instead of buying a pricey cake, we used box mix, spiced it up a bit with Alex’s secret sauce, and made adorable cupcakes.
Next time I’ll share more details from the baby shower, including some downloadable pdfs for straw flags and cupcake toppers. Meanwhile, if you have any questions please leave a comment.
Did you like this? Please share:
Related posts:
Ahoy, mateys! How stinkin’ cute are these pirate ship fabric wall decals by Love Mae? Just think of the stories you could make up at bedtime about these guys. That octopus looks mighty sneaky. I wonder if he knows it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Daytoday??
We’re not up for painting our son’s room this year, but his new room could certainly use some color and fun. I think these retro – cool decals are the perfect way to add some charm to his room without breaking a sweat with a paint brush. The stickers are made of adhesive fabric, so they are removable and reusable — I think he’ll have fun rearranging them. Love Mae also has some super adorable girls’ room decals (think ponies and woodland creatures and other charming scenes). They even have a circus scene. Ridiculously adorable!;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
