How's everybody doing? Fine I hope! It's been super busy around here. Seems like I'm always saying that, but it's true! lol I have a long post and lots of pictures to share so I'm going to jump right into it.
My daughter (Tara), my granddaughter (Jordan) and I have been extremely busy getting ready for a baby shower for one of Tara's BFFs. These two have known each other and hung around together since they were about 11 years old, quite a long time. So Candi is like a member of our family and Tara was very honored to host a baby shower for her. Of course Tara's first call was to momma..... "Can you help?" and of course I jumped in with a loud YES! So we set on our journey and started planning.
Candi wanted it to be primarily for family and really close friends and it was to be a boy/girl party. I must admit, I know that's the thing now, but I'm old school so it was a new experience for me. We planned a cookout with plenty of food, cupcakes for dessert and present opening as the main events for the party. Candi's step-mom wanted to have some shower games so she took charge of those events. So with everything scoped out, we got our creative juices flowing and here's what we came up with.
I love creating memory books. They seem to be so much easier for me to put together than a card. Seems odd to me but it takes me forever to design a card and then I'm always a little disappointed because it never looks as good as what it did in my imagination. lol But I keep trying. Anyway, I've created several memory books and I always enjoy the process. This time though I decided I'd try and make it into a real book, so I started off with some research on how I could bind it all together. And to my surprise, I quickly found a fantastic tutorial on this subject. It was clear and easy follow and only used supplies that I currently had on hand. Woohoo! I didn't have to purchase anything! I was very pleased with the results. But more about that later.
Once I verified that I could make my own book, I started creating the individual pages that I would include. I wanted to create something that would allow Candi to show off the special holiday pictures of the baby in a fun way. So I wanted each page to revolve around a picture. I used images from my Vintage Greeting Card collection as temporary place holders in the picture frames. These will be replaced by actual pictures of the baby as the year goes on. I also planned on including a little journal tag behind each image.
I used 12x12 pastel card stock and cut each one in half which gave me two sheets of 6x12 which I folded in half. This gave me two pages of 6x6 paper. I planned on only decorating the inside of the folded sheet and left the outside of the sheets blank. Now, all I had to do was decorate it and here's the results.
The Mommy and Me page was the last page that I created and I had pretty much used up all the good pastel color sheets, so I'm not too fond of the colors used. But didn't want to run to the store... lol
Now all I had to do was bind them all together. Remember back a ways I told you I left the outside of the 6x6 sheets blank. I knew I was going to use different colors of the pastel card stock so I didn't really want to decorate a page that was say half blue and half green so my intention was to attach the outside sheets together. I was a little worried about the thickness of the decorated pages. So as I had them all stacked together and was analyzing them I decided I would only attach the front edges of the back sides of the sheet to each other. That way the back side or folded edge was a little freer to move. Hopefully that makes sense. So I used lots of sticky tape on about half of outside sheet (non-folded edge) on one of the undecorated sides and carefully attached it to next page in the book. This worked like a charm. Each page was now doubly thick and sturdy but the folded edge was free. I didn't remember to take pictures during this process so if this doesn't make any sense just let me know and I'll recreate what I did and snap a few pics to help you out.
Now, it was time to make my book cover. Like I said earlier, I found this fantastic tutorial that walked me through the process. You can check it out by clicking here. It was really easy to do and I was very pleased with the outcome.
A couple of things to be aware of... I was too slow with attaching the binding to the back of the pages so my hot glue cooled enough that I had to add more. So I think the next time, I will only do about half of the length at a time and then attach it to the binding vs. the whole length. Also, I used a cotton based material as my cover so by the time I had the whole thing covered in glue, it was seeping through to the table, so be sure and do this process on something that won't be harmed by some white glue. lol And one other word of caution, I was a little disappointed in how the cotton fabric looked after it was attached. There was some dark and light splotches all over it. My guess is that this is caused by the amount of glue that was used and the fact that it wasn't evenly spread across the fabric. The decorations that I put on the outside of the book masked this problem a little bit, but I think I might try a different type of fabric the next time. All in all, for a first time project I was very pleased with the results.
Here's Candi and Rudy checking out their memory book.
Tara decided she wanted to create a diaper cake for Candi. So once again, an Internet search yielded all the information we needed to complete our design. We checked out several sites and combined different techniques together but you can click here to view a tutorial on creating your own diaper cake. Tara gathered together the supplies, 2 bags of newborn Pampers, some ribbon, some rubber bands and plenty of little things for decoration. Then Tara, Jordan and I got busy and created our "cake". My primary job was rolling diapers and creating the bow both of which look pretty good (teehee). It was simple to do and it only took us about 2 hours. Here's Jordan with our finished project.
The last thing we had to do was bake and decorate cup cakes. We created some little cup cake toppers using guess what? - Why Vintage Baby Images of course! I set up some little 3" round images and we used a scallop die cut. We then used the same scallop die cut out some pretty card stock for the back. Jordan glued them all together - her first time using hot glue. I only heard a couple ouches.. lol .
And our finished cup cakes.....
For games, Candi's step mom had the guys create babies using play dough then Candi and Rudy had to judge which one was the best. This was a really cute idea and I was surprised at how creative the guys were. I didn't get any pictures of their babies, but everyone really enjoyed this game. She had a play "How much toliet paper does it take to go around Candi's belly". It was really fun watching the guys try and figure this out. Some were really nice and some not so nice. lol
So that's it folks, everyone had a great time and I can't wait for the baby to arrive!
Have a great week, plumb full of smiles!
Peggy
