Red and Aqua Baby Shower for Delaney Love

PART 1- Preparations and Decorations!
This past month I have been planning and preparing a baby shower.  This shower was for my dearest friend, Crystal, and her fourth baby!  Crystal is planning on decorating the nursery in red and aqua.  The baby's name will be Delaney Love,
so Crystal wants to incorporate hearts into the theme as well.  We decided to stick with the nursery colors for the baby shower.  I absolutely love this color combination!  It is so bold.  I think that it can be portrayed as either elegant or whimsical.  I searched online and on Pinterest for decorating ideas and noticed that a lot of brides had chosen these colors for their weddings.  The only problem with the color combo is finding the right shade of aqua blue.  This was very difficult for me.  I searched high and low for this color.  I typically found only turquoise or light blue.  Finding anything in a red/aqua pattern was nearly impossible.  Therefore I really had to improvise to get this shower put together.  Now don't think that I'm complaining.  I LOVE (no pun intended) party planning and I was up for the challenge.  I love to re-create pinterest ideas, but I also enjoy being creative.  This shower was a mixture of both.  My goal for the shower was to make decorative baby shower items that could double as nursery decor or functional items for the baby.

After searching at Michaels, Hobby Lobby, Wal-Mart, Target, Oriental Trading, Party City, and Amazon,  it turned out that some of my best finds came from DOLLAR TREE!  These are the items that I bought from the Dollar Tree.  Fake roses, a loofah, little girl dress-up necklace, ribbon, wiffle balls, wrapping paper, blue glass beads, a picture frame, and heart shaped dishes.  It was all less than $20.

My first dollar store project was making a hanging rose ball.  I hot glued the individual flowers around the ball

and this is how it came out!

The next project was hot gluing these aqua colored glass beads to the heart shaped dish

to make this.  After using it as a serving dish I figured Crystal could use it to hold Q tips, safety pins, or whatever she wanted in the nursery.  I ended up making two of these.

Okay so I was desperate because I hadn't found many aqua colored items and this Loofah was the right color.  I picked it up from the store because I knew I could probably do something with it!  I combined it with a rose.... 

cut off about a one inch strip of this long snaky piece ...

added a round bead from the kiddie necklace...

and voila!  A decorative band to go around a glass vase.

 

It also doubles as a baby headband!  The loofah material is very soft and stretchy.  Who knew it would be good material for a headband?

I then made a mini diaper cake out of a heart shaped wire wreath, Pampers size 1 diapers, red tulle, baby socks, and the rest of the loofah.

A little acrylic paint, hot glue, tulle, and necklace beads turned this brown dollar picture frame into

this!

 This frame was used at a diaper writing station.  Guests wrote messages on baby diapers for mama.

 

This is the diaper writing station.  The roses on the pens are made out of streamers. A cardboard box holding the diapers is wrapped in the dollar store wrapping paper and decorated with Cricut letters. 

A close-up of the diaper wreath that I made.  It is also made out of size 1 Pampers, a styrofoam wreath, ribbons, small rubberbands, a red wooden "D" and artificial flowers.

A banner that I made out of tissue paper. It says Delaney in case you're slow ;)

 

Some maternity pics that Crystal took and set out at the shower.  Her husband, Nik, snapped these shots, and I think he did a great job!

This is a wreath that I coincidentally made at MOPS just days before.  I plan on using it for Christmas, too.

 Here is my favorite project.  I made a beautiful red and aqua tutu for Delaney to wear.

The tutu also served as a table centerpiece on my dessert tower.

The poms were made out of tissue paper.  You can see the red rose ball hanging in the middle.  Since my orange walls clashed with the red and aqua, I was trying to create a separation.  I used a red table cloth and tulle to drape across the table like a canopy.  I made oreo truffles (crowd favorite), heart shaped sugar cookies, and turtle cookies for the dessert tower.  You can see the tutu at the bottom.

These are homemade oreos made out of Hershey's extra dark cocoa with heart imprints.

Red and aqua cake balls.  These were the kids' favorite.  I think Myleigh ate 3 and Arden ate 5

What's dessert without coffee??!!?  At least in my house coffee is a must.  Crystal also loves coffee so I set up a coffee bar.  In the crockpot there is warm cream, milk, white chocolate chips, and semi-sweet chocolate chips.  There was also regular creamer, sweeteners, cinnamon, pumpkin spice, and whipped cream on the bar so that guests could have their coffee however they chose.  Some non-coffee drinkers just had the hot chocolate from the crock pot!

 

Here was the highlight of the party (besides the oreo truffles.)  Chuy's creamy jalepeno dip!  I have never seen dip disappear so fast!  I made almost 2 quarts of dip and it was gone by the end of the party!  You can see my heart glass dishes being put to good use!

 

Part 2 - The Shower!
The actual baby shower was a huge success!  Crystal found a company that provides an ultrasound service at baby showers.  A registered ultrasound sonographer brings a portable ultrasound machine to the shower and scans the baby for an hour.  The tech plays games with the guests, measures the baby, will reveal the gender upon request, and even do 3-D imaging of baby.  The mother also gets a disk of the images.  It is such a neat idea for a shower!  As an ultrasound tech myself, I think this is a fun idea.  I wish I had my own ultrasound machine to start my own business! 

The guests all showed up an hour before the tech arrived.  This gave us all time to visit, eat, and take pictures. 

The tech then came and set up.  She requested a reclining chair for the mom, a few towels, and a TV so that the guests could see the baby.  Our bigger TV didn't have the right connections, so we used a smaller TV instead.   

The games included guessing the baby's heart rate, guessing what body parts were being shown, guessing the size of the baby, etc.

the head is being measured

 Delaney was being stubborn inside her mama's belly.  The tech was trying to get 3-D imaging of her face, but she was hiding.  Therefore, the lady asked Crystal to get up and walk around to make Delaney shift positions.  Crystal decided to belly dance for us instead!

The ultrasound person also let three guests have a try at being the sonographer.  They each had one minute to try to get the best picture of the spine.  Let's just say none of them should quit their day jobs!

gifts for the game winners

Amanda won a game so she's showing off her scare crow.

After the ultrasound fun, Crystal opened up her presents and we ate more dip!

 After all of the guests left, we polished off the sweets and started cleaning up.  As we were cleaning an extra roll of ribbon got away from us.  Instead of rewinding it around the spool manually, Brian and Nik got the bright idea to use the drill instead.

Surprisingly it worked.  They wound the nine yards of ribbon back onto the spool in a matter of seconds.  This kept the boys entertained for far too long.  I continued cleaning and they kept playing with the string like kittens. They kept doing it over and over and over.  Boys and their power tools!

I loved putting this shower together.  The red and aqua was a awesome color combination.  Congratulations to Nik and Crystal and I'm so excited to meet Delaney in November!