Oh Boy Shower

A couple weeks ago I co-hosted a shower for my good friend, Jes. I've talked a lot about her on here as my friend and Adalyn's photographer. But before she took pictures of my child, she was my apartment-mate during college and after college. We've been friends during our crazy single lives, when we started dating our husbands, our weddings and now babies. We are just about extreme opposites but it's perfect.  I was so thrilled to be able to give her a baby shower for her sweet baby boy who is going to be here shortly.

Along with being honored to give the shower, I was equally worried about decorating for the shower. Jes is the artistic one of us. Neither of us are into baby-ish baby shower decorations so I knew I had to do something different.  Jes told me she was looking into using grey, light blue and green for the nursery so I went with those colors and got some ideas for "oh boy" showers from Pinterest. 

The first thing I did was contact my friend Shannon, who did all the paper stuff for Adalyn's birthday. She works with Jes' husband (and me too) so she had a good idea for what Jes' tastes were. She created awesome invitations, drink flags, wish cards, food tents and a banner that were perfect! And perfectly "Jes"!  Here are some pictures:

The invitation. (Please don't be jealous of my mad photoshop skills!)

I love paper straws. I found these on etsy.

 A peek at the food table and the cute table tents.

 Sweet Wish Cards. The co-host had seen this idea online somewhere and Shannon tweaked it for us. It was a sweet idea and I'm sure fun for Jes to read all of the wishes for her sweet baby. (We didn't play games because we're not into silly shower games. This is the closest we came to a shower game.)

 Cute banner. If you enlarge the pic, you can see it has chevrons on the outside of each letter. It was so understated and so clean. Loved it.

Also, if you noticed in the last picture, you will see a bunch of pictures. I had this crazy idea to feature pictures since Jes is a photographer. I contacted Jes' and Justin's moms to get baby pictures. Then I got some of the Christmas pictures that Jes and Justin had taken (closest to maternity pictures I could get). And I also got an ultrasound of Caleb. Billie found this idea online as a way to "frame" the pictures. I was going to try to just mount the pictures to foam board, but she had an idea to use painters tape and spray paint to make the frames decorative. I originally was going to do a chevron pattern but I ran out of patience and just did some other patterns. I used grey hard boards from Hobby Lobby and then used dark tacks from the scrap booking section to secure the pictures to the frames. I thought about taking a picture while I was making them but then totally forgot. Bad blogger!! I loved how they turned out and i think Jes appreciated the personal touch!  here are a few other frames we had around:

Another fun idea I got from pinterest (and I'd post the pin but the pin didn't have a good link so it doesn't help) was this cute front door welcome sign. It is a "little man" type sign instead of a normal "baby" sign. I loved it! I used scrapbook paper from Hob Lob cut into the shape of neck ties, attached letters I had a friend who has a Cricut cut for me and I threaded some twine to hang it.  (Sorry about the glare from the storm door. It was raining that day so I didn't want to put the sign on the outside of the door to get wet.)

Here is a picture of the food table with the poms that Billie so graciously made for us to use. We just had light food because the shower was at 1pm.

The other decoration I made was a diaper cake. I like making diaper cakes for the showers I throw because they are cute decorations and also useful! They are fairly simple to make once you get all the diapers rolled up. You just need about 6 hands to hold everything straight while you get the layers secured! I thought this turned out cute.

 I ordered the fabric for the table at Carousel Designs and was super impressed with the price, quality and ship time. I would recommend them! I think it gave the room a festive feel.

And now that we've seen the shower details, how about some pictures from the actual shower! We planned the shower on a weekend when some of our old college friends were coming in town for a girls weekend, so it was a great time to all get together and see each other. 

My college girls having a laugh. We had 3 toddlers and 1 baby at the shower so they were good entertianment.

 Jes and me

Jes got lots of great presents.

 This onesie was my favorite gift I gave Jes. It was so perfect for her and so cute. I got it from here on etsy.

A picture of our college roommates and friends.

 Another group of girlfriends. (3 pregos and 1 post baby - even tho she doesn't look it!)

There were other girls at the shower but I'm not going to post pictures of them because I don't know how they feel about blogging:)

I think the shower turned out well! I hope everyone had a good time...I think they did. And Jes got some great gifts. So all in all it was a great time celebrating Jes and baby Caleb!