Baby Shower on a Budget

My sister-in-law and I had the honor of hosting our sister’s baby shower. You won’t believe where we did our shopping…the dollar store. I’m excited to share with you my tips and secrets on how to create a gorgeous baby shower on a budget.

DECOR

Here’s where our frugal shopping paid off!  Yup!  You guessed it, we bought almost ALL of our decorations at the dollar store.

Look at the finished product!  None of our guests would’ve believed that we decorated this shower on a dollar store budget.

After creatively decorating my staircase for my son’s Superhero party, I knew we HAD to do a similar idea for the baby shower.

We decided on pink and white with a hint of green for the shower colors.  We took pink, white and green streamers and twisted them along the banister.  We then used tissue paper to create these adorable tissue paper flowers.

Please excuse the lovely 90’s brass fixtures.

That’s a homemade burlap wreath that mom made!  How cute is that?!

Using streamers we decided to create a “streamer waterfall” in one of the windows.  We added balloons at the top to complete the beautiful window streamer feature.

I did learn a tip from mom on HOW to hang balloons at the top of the window.  The last time I did this I used tape and it was a mess!  I was never fully satisfied at the outcome.

This time I used a long piece of ribbon and tied the balloons individually in a straight line.  I then attached the strand of balloons to my curtain rod with some tape.

Here are some pictures that my son took of me while I was putting together the balloons.  Please excuse the baby bump…

This picture reminds me I need to do more bicep/tricep exercises.  Oye.

Using dollar store tablecloths our talented mom turned my ugly brown chair into this!

She cut a pink and white tablecloth in half and then tied these huge bows around the back of the chair.  She even tied them on the chair legs to make it more cute!

We thought this was the perfect look for the guest of honor’s gift opening chair.

We also decided to use the streamers as a backdrop for the wall where our sister would be sitting to open her gifts.

We found these dollar store banners to top off the beautiful wall backdrop!  We of course couldn’t let it stop there.  We used smaller tissue paper flowers to accent the top of our vertical banners.

The other two windows were decorated with balloons, paper banners and tissue paper flowers (dollar store).

We opted to not do helium balloons to keep the costs down and instead decided to hang balloons in the entryway with ribbon.  A reverse helium balloon, if you will!

This was my ONE splurge for the decor.  I found these adorable, pink, lantern balls to hang from my chandelier.  I used a 40% off coupon at Hobby Lobby.  I LOVE coupons!  You can also find them on Amazon.

I attended a baby shower once where they displayed cute baby clothes on a clothesline as part of the decor.  We decided to do the same with some cute, new outfits for baby girl!

SET UP

Because of the size of our shower we decided on 2- 6 foot long fold out tables (I also use these regularly as my garage sale tables!).  Mom rented chairs for only $1 each!  We thought that was totally worth it since none of us collectively had enough matching chairs.

Using our dollars store plastic tablecloths, we layered them to create a beautiful bow and “pick up.”

After that we laid down our place mats.  We decided on these cute card stock, scalloped paper pages for our place mats.

We almost didn’t use a place mat but then last-minute, my sister discovered these in Mom’s craft pile and thought they were perfect!  Here’s a really cool tool that cuts pretty scalloped edges on paper.

In the entryway, we placed a table with our party favors, advice jar, candy guessing jar and an adorable pregnancy progression scrapbook mom made for our sister.

My daughter LOVED helping out!  One of her jobs was to make sure each person placed a note of advice in the jar.

What we hadn’t planned on, and was a nice surprise, was our guest of honor reading the pieces of advice out loud at the end of the shower so all the guests could hear.  It was so sweet and some were just hilarious!

Mom used her Cricut and cut these cute little onesies out of paper for the advice jar.

We displayed our guessing jar game on this table so that our guests could place their guess in the jar as they arrived.  What worked out even better was to have my daughter walk around and collect the guesses from each guest after they were seated and chatting.

These were cute little feet that were cut from mom’s Cricut.  The guests wrote their name and guess on them.

TABLE TOP SET UP

Mason jars, pink burlap, pink doily and pink ribbon were used to dazzle up our flower arrangement jars.

Here’s a peek at the adorable napkins that mom made.  To make the napkins, she used a tutorial on Pinterest and then embossed the napkins with her Cuttlebug and then pink ribbon tied in a bow!  We found the plasticware that looks like silverware at the dollar store too!

Most of the guests commented that the napkins were too pretty to use.  I, on the other hand, thought that not only should they be used, but they’re great for a little fun too!

We decided to use beautiful vintage glassware for our table settings.  Our mom is queen of garage sales and has collected vintage glassware for years.  She’s also queen of tea parties too and often uses this glassware for her parties.  Some day soon I will blog about one of her fabulous tea parties!

We chose these adorable glass plates, and water goblets.

We also used vintage water pitchers and placed them on the tables with either cucumber or lemon infused water.

We sought the help from fellow Frappuccino drinkers and asked that they help us collect their empty glass frap bottles.  We then washed, and peeled off the labels of the bottles.

Using a white doily, pink yarn and baby shower themed buttons, we created the most adorable glass drinking jars you’ve ever seen!  Mom found these cute, pink straws at Hobby Lobby!

BABY SHOE FAVOR TUTORIAL

Our party favors were in the making LONG before any other plans had been made.  It was partly inspired by something on Pinterest and mostly inspired by mom.  We used a Cricut cut for our shoe template.

Click HERE to see the baby shower shoe favor tutorial.

 GAMES/PRIZES

To keep our costs down, we went to our closets to find what was new but unused that we could re-purpose for our prizes.  We came up with some really nice gifts!  It’s amazing what you can find at home that you’ve never used!

I also put together a gift bag full of stationary items from the bins at my local craft store.  I’ve also seen practical, cost-effective items that would make perfect prizes at local big box stores!

Oops! My Water Broke!

My SIL purchased these cute little babies from her local craft store.  We then placed them in ice-cube trays and froze them 4 days before the shower to make sure they were good and frozen.  We dropped one cube in each of our guests water goblet to get the game started!  Here is the actual game set from Amazon if you so desire to buy the game set.  We were surprised at how long it took for those babies to break free!  This was a fun game and some of the gals were trying to get creative in figuring out how to make their ice-cube melt faster!

Baby Bottle Bottoms Up!

We filled pink baby bottles (4 oz. size) half way up with apple juice.  The object of the game is to see who can suck it all down the fastest.  I would’ve LOVE to have posted some of the pictures of the super competitive ladies we had but out of respect for them, I won’t.  The pictures are less than flattering.  This game was fun to watch!

We of course, couldn’t JUST have a pink baby bottle.  We had to add some white tulle, tied in a bow to make it pretty.

Here I am making sure that the bottle levels are equal.  It would’ve been smart to just look at the ounce marks on the side.  Oh well!  This was more fun!

How Big is Mom-to-Be?

Using some pink ribbon that I had on hand we measured our guest of honor’s waist.  Here’s the official Baby Shower Tummy Measure game.  We kept it a secret as to how “big” her belly was.  We walked around the room with ribbon and asked each guess to cut off their “guess” as to how “round” mom-to-be is.  This was fun too!  Most people were very generous and some were well… let’s just say, way off!

Candy Guessing Jar Game

As I previously mentioned, we had a candy guessing jar.  This was a quick easy game that is always fun to see how well people can estimate!

FOOD

Keeping it simple yet delicious we set out to our local Costco and found an amazing chicken salad that we paired with croissants and yummy turkey pin wheel wraps.

We added a side pasta salad, fruit salad in a waffle cone and veggies in a baguette.  Our guests loved the food and went back for seconds!

We scooped out the center of cucumbers and filled them with the chicken salad.

We used these pretty vintage glass cups to serve the pasta salad.

Our fruit salad was a mix of strawberries, grapes, melon and pineapple.  We scooped our fruit into yummy waffle cones that we dressed up with some scrapbook paper.

We scooped out the center of the baguette and dropped in spinach dip.  We chose carrot, celery and cucumber sticks for our veggies.

DESSERTS

We set up our dessert/coffee/tea bar in the kitchen on the island.

We chose some homemade brownies that my sweet daughter cut out with a heart-shaped cutter, and mom made some yummy sugar frosted cookies.

We displayed our beautiful tea cups in these darling holders that mom has collected through the years.

Cake

My SIL has a very talented friend that makes cakes!  She did an amazing job for us.  Not only was the cake super cute it was DElicious!

Here’s a quick peek at how to turn a simple white cake stand into a “pretty in pink tulle” cake stand!

This cake stand has little holes/slots in it for threading either ribbon or tulle through it.  Here’s a shot of mom dressing it up!

Thank you so much for reading!  Not only was it important to me to share our journey to a beautiful baby shower for our sister but I wanted to paint a picture of HOW to do an adorable baby shower on a budget!

Happy baby shower planning to all!

 

 

Looking for more baby shower inspiration…