So besides forming a human (which has given me horrible morning all-day sickness and has made me super tired), another thing has been (happily) taking up my free time...
I've been busy putting together a baby shower for my dear friend Lauren!
(and her sweet baby Fern)
The theme was roughly "breakfast in the woods"and included lots of pinecones, sticks, moss, ferns (get it) and yarn (to warm it up a bit).
Last November Lauren, Kira, Lindsey and I went to a workshop at Anthropologie to help them get their Christmas displays ready. We chose the fingerknitting station and we've kind of been obsessed ever since. I thought it would be such a fun idea for a large impact shower decoration that is actually really cheap to do!
This was the first thing people saw when they pulled up to our house.
Kind of like a sneak peek of what's to come...
the living room:
(warning: no pink/purple was used in the making of this shower)
(can you handle it?)
the pom flower bouquet favors:
(I collected about 384750 sticks and pinecones for this party from around our neighborhood.
I totally looked like a crazy lady picking something up every five feet.)
Lauren loooves breakfast food so I knew I wanted to incorporate it into the day.
We planned the shower for 11am so we could pull it off!
The grub:
We also had fruit salad, sliced apples with peaut butter and nutella, pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and cinnamon oat scones.
(we totally overplanned in the food department, but that's better than running out!)
Unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the centerpiece but it was just jars filled with different kinds of pinecones and layered with moss from our backyard apple tree. We randomly placed a bunch of tealights around them for ambiance.
Lauren is also a big fan of ginger ale and I had pinned this tutorial for homemade ginger ale over the summer. Chris took charge of making the ginger syrup from scratch and it turned out really well!
my crockpot with the egg casserole in it.
This is the only thing that I wish I had doubled but didn't.
It was sooo good and so easy to just throw everything into the crockpot.
I think I'll be making this for Christmas morning!
Shower games are always cheesy and lame.
This non-game was not.
I made this calender (straight lines engineered by Chris) for people to guess Fern's birthday.
(Genius idea originally spotted on Bump Smitten.)
(I'm guessing Fern will be born Jan 24th at 12:30am.)
Random stuff always looks good when it's grouped together, so I just gathered all my clear/brown glass vessels and put pinecones/sticks/ferns/candles/nothing in them to decorate the mantle.
We finished it off with some yarn-wrapped "f's" for Lauren to take home to put in the nursery.
Of course we had a fire going to up the cozyness factor:
the guest(s) of honor:
the homemade hot chocolate bar:
I used this amazing recipe (multipied by 5 for 20 servings).
Guests were able to make their cocoa even more tasty by adding either french truffles, carmels, crushed candy canes, andes mints and homemade whipped cream.
This was definitely a hit!
Chris made some french press from his freshly roasted beans and we kept it toasty in our very appropriate Stanley thermoses:
To make present opening less awkward, we had people fingerknit if they wanted to. Lauren was able to take the garlands home to decorate the nursery with!
(here is a great tutorial if you'd like to learn how to fingerknit!)
Here is Jamie explaining how to do it:
Lauren got so many great things and we had a lot of fun planning this party for her!
Now sweet baby Fern just needs to get here!
And here are all of us with Lauren!
Thanks for putting up with my butt-long emails filled with ideas and more ideas for the shower ladies...everything turned out even better than I had imagined thanks to your help!
And also a big thanks to Chris for helping me out in so many ways and for not thinking I'm crazy for wanting to (and actually helping me) make 70 pom stick flower things!
So cute!! You did such a great job Becca!! I bet Lauren (and Fern) felt very loved :)
wow... I absolutely LOVE this shower! Like LOVE LOVE. Great ideas and it is so beautiful! I am totally not into the pink thing either and this shower just makes me SWOON!
Just beautiful. Way to put that eye to work! Also, you're making me hungry. That casserole looks to die for. I made some ginger ale last week too - easy and delicious!
I love all your photos...they're way better than mine were! I'm totally stealing them :).
Thank you again for all of your hard work! You are such an awesome friend and my shower could not have been more perfect....it's like you know me or something :).
so cute becca! really wish that was on the menu at my house tomorrow morning - yaaaa-uuuummmm! very fun :)
Oh so cute!!! You two are such pink and purple haters!!! :)
Good thing I didn't cone afterall because the room would have been filled with tired baby Evelyn screeches! You look so cute Becca!!
Oh so cute!!! You two are such pink and purple haters!!! :)
Good thing I didn't cone afterall because the room would have been filled with tired baby Evelyn screeches! You look so cute Becca!!
Becca, you really did an amazing job on this shower! I was so impressed.
Tell Chris the Ginger Ale was really good!
You should be a professional baby shower thrower:-) Great job little mama! I'm sure you rested well after all of the hullabaloo:-) xoxo
Beautiful shower! The lovely Lauren let me feature it on my blog.. I hope you like the feature! http://www.awellcraftedparty.com/2011/11/real-party-shower-for-baby-fern.html