shower number two

hower two of four took place this weekend and it was a super special one. My dear friend Bethany will be getting married in just a few short weeks and we had so much fun showering her with fun things for her home! And as you might have guessed, I had fun crafting for it. I wanted to use non-traditional colors for decorations and food (surprise, surprise) and I got my inspiration from this color palette put together by Laura of Flights of Fancy, which is one of my favorite blogs for such things:

Unique color palettes are so much fun, but they can be tricky, because the very fact that they are unique means no craft stores in a 200 mile radius will sell anything that has any two of these colors together. So you have to be a bit creative and put them together yourself. I enjoyed the challenge…mostly…and altogether it turned out quite nicely.

We had the shower at my church and luckily for me, the walls in that room are painted gray and a dark, dusty purple, which helped everything feel even more coordinated without being overly matchy-matchy. The entire shower was held together with double-sided tape, which is my BFF. I think I used an entire roll of it just for this shower. It’s magical stuff.
It was a mid-morning shower so the menu included easy breakfast-type foods. My favorite part was the make-your-own yogurt parfait bar. We had mango, strawberries, blackberries and granola for toppings – so delicious. We also had coffee cake squares, donut holes, and fruit kabobs.

Now before you go judging me for spending waaaaay too much time on the decor, you need to know that the paper circle garland hanging on the wall was the easiest thing to make in the whole wide world. I’m totally serious. I got the idea here. You just punch out circles of scrapbook paper (or notebook paper, cardstock, what-have-you) and sew them together. I’m no sewing expert, but I know the basics of running the machine. You just feed one circle through at a time and let the machine make a couple “blank” stitches between circles so each piece can twist a little. It took me about 10 minutes to make a garland that ran the length of my living room and from there I just cut it into several different lengths depending on where I wanted to hang or wrap it. (Ok, I still spent too much time crafting the decor, despite the easy garland, but at least I enjoyed doing it.)

Fresh flowers are nice to have, but are kind of an unnecessary cost if you’re trying to keep things reasonable. This is when you thank your landlord for planting beautiful lilac bushes in your backyard for you to trim and bring to the purple showers you are hosting. I wanted them to just be something extra to put on each of the tables we would have people eating at. I brought a few of my drinking glasses from home to serve as bud vases.

Another detail that kept the colors and patterns I was using tied into the food was the decorated kabob sticks. More on those in a later post…

I wanted Bethany’s gift to serve as extra party decor, so I picked out a frame on her bridal registry that would go with my colors and created a customized print for the inside, then “wrapped”/decorated it with extra crafting supplies I had leftover.

My sweet, sweet friend, the bride.

And the women who made this party happen. Woohoo! We had fun. Throw your friends showers. It’s worth it. 🙂

(drop cap “S” by Jessica Hische via the Daily Drop Cap project.)