Pepper Design Blog

Bedtime Stories Baby Shower Part 3: Temporary Cake Stands

I have two more posts to share with you from the Bedtime Stories baby shower (part 1 & part 2) that I threw for our friend Diana back in November (ps, Baby Noah is here! And as adorable as can be).

When putting together the dessert buffet that was sort of the focal point of the dining room, I wanted to create a few tiered cake stands that would add a little height and variety. In the past I’ve covered boxes or stacks of books with fabric so that certain platters would be higher than others, but this time around I came up with a temporary adhesive solution so that I could turn a few of my favorite plates, vases and candle holders into cake stands without any permanent damage (I’ve also gone the super glue route with thrift store finds).

This is a trick I will use time and again! It’s so easy.

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Temporary Cake Stands
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Materials: any sort of glassware, platter, plate, dish or vase, adhesive putty

My trick to getting a fairly good stick with stacking dishware is by using an adhesive putty like this one. It’s available at nearly all craft and home improvement stores and the brand isn’t important, but you want to look for a product that claims a strong but removable stick.

The process of assembling is pretty simple. I applied a layer of the adhesive to the edge of the glassware and plates making sure to cover as much surface space as possible.

Since I was covering an area of the vases/plates that wouldn’t be seen, I applied a thick layer:

Then I turned the vase/candlestick/dish over and pressed it into the center of my plate or platter for at least 30 seconds. You could use a utility knife to clean up any edges if you wanted a cleaner look.

Using this technique a made a few different tiered stands for our selection of desserts.

At the end of the shower I simply pulled off all of the putty and washed each dish. No harm done!

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Liv’s First Birthday Party

We had such a wonderful time celebrating Liv’s first birthday. You only get to do a first birthday once (and I suspect future birthdays will be dictated by the little one) so I took advantage and had a lot fun planning out and preparing for a big day.

I’m not sure how the theme initially came about, but a striped, circus-y party slowly developed as we planned. (Okay… get ready for way too many pictures.)

We’ve had record breaking warm weather (think low 80′s) here this January so we planned for a beautiful day at the park (that and our house has a bit of open construction going on right now). Oh we were biting our nails though… 5 days till the party and the weatherman promised 10% chance of rain, 2 days until the big day and my iPhone notified me we were up to a 60% chance of rain! and that morning we woke to a forecast of 20% chance of precipitation. Thankfully we had a quick sprinkle when setting up but other than that a dry – albeit a bit chilly – day. But no matter, we had a great time anyway.

After deciding on the carnival/circus theme, I came across this party and was immediately inspired to create a similar tablecloth for our food/dessert table. I purchased 10 yards of Ikea striped fabric and used Stitch Witchery to hem a skirt and a top piece. I included elastic in the top hem of the skirt to create the ruching effect and kept the skirt and top pieces separate so that if I ever wanted to cover a different sized table it would be easy to adjust (these two 6′ foot banquet tables are covered on three sides, but my skirt would easily wrap around an entire 8′ table, for example). I think I may go back and sew my hems into place now that the rush of getting ready for the party is over…

We dined on Kevin’s smoked pulled pork sandwiches and potato salad, and washed it all down with homemade pink lavender lemonade (Kev’s new recipe that he coaxed out of one of our favorite local restaurants).

Friends and family helped pull the little dessert bar together (my Grandma made her famous wedding cookies, peanut butter cookies and adorable iced ’1′ cookies) and a big thanks to friends Liz and Stephanie for adding cookies and the awesome cake pops to the mix!

I made Liv’s first birthday cake from a box mix and covered it whipped cream icing and handmade pink fondant polka dots.

There were just a few yards of fabric leftover from the tablecloth and so I covered a few pillows from the house for the picnic area. All of these red fleece blankets were scooped up on sale at Ikea for $2.50 a piece – much cheaper than renting chairs!

On the other side of our little space of park, we strung up the super-easy-to-make fabric bunting from this party in the trees above the present table:

And added a string of matted black and white photos from Liv’s first year.

Luckily I had family in town for the weekend so that our little army could assemble the entire party Sunday morning (Mom, you are the best!). I was so nervous that our spot at the park would be taken (it was a holiday weekend, after all) that I asked my dad and all of the brothers to take shifts ‘guarding’ it from 7:30am on. But in the end we were the only party on this cloudy day!

Liv was quite unsure about her birthday cake. It could have been the 30ish people standing around and watching her but she was verrry hesitant before finally tasting and diving right in. I did attempt to light the candles but the breeze wasn’t having it .

We offered forks to any other kids that wanted to help her with her birthday cake – I feared a sore tummy was inevitable!

Finally, we played and played. I found pink bouncy balls at Toy’s R Us for $1.99 and  bought a dozen animal beach balls as prizes for the little relay we set up.

One of Liv’s birthday presents was an adorable peach tutu from her buddy Gigi. That inspired some serious running with balloons during clean up after everyone had left.

Yes, that is her dress awkwardly tucked into her tutu.

You know how I’m always talking about all of those uncles? Here’s a visual.

Too bad this one is just a little out of focus… but it’s adorable! Dad and Grandpa are in the mix too, but she has seven of these wonderful guys (two are missing) as uncles looking out for her!

And there it is, Liv’s first birthday celebration .

Bedtime Stories Baby Shower Part 2: Fabric & Ribbon Bunting

Back with a few more details from the Bedtime Stories baby shower that I shared last week. I’m all about handmade decorations so two of the little projects I worked on leading up to the shower included a set of fabric flags and a little ‘ribbon strand’ to hang onesies from (which was our shower craft project).

So I’m still not exactly sure what the major difference is between fabric bunting, pennants and flags are… but I’m pretty sure they’re all basically describing this:

We’ll call them flags today .

I made a no-sew version for Liv’s nursery out of left over fabric remnants from her room decor a while back and had used a fusible iron-on hem tape to put it all together.

But I was pretty sure there was an even easier no-sew way to make a really large set of flags for this party.

What ended up making the bunting so super simple was the basic stitch at the bottom of each to create the individual flags. No sewing machine, not even an iron!

I opted for a light weight quilting cotton from Joanns and raided the quilting squares remnant boxes that they usually have throughout their store. Each quilting square made roughly three flags (which started as diamonds… more on that soon) and I probably had somewhere around 40 when all were cut.

I split the 40ish flags between two long lengths of thin twine to make two different strands. I know I’ll use these for lots and lots of different types of parties (they’re just really fun to throw up and around whether they’re indoors or out) so I kept the colors soft and gender neutral.

One set was strung over our buffet in the dining room (above) and one was added to the fireplace mantle.

But back to putting these together…

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Super Simple Fabric Party Flags
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Materials: fabric remnants, scissors, needle & thread, twine (or ribbon or string), white glue (such as Elmer’s)

We first cut up the fabric remnants into large diamonds and folded the diamonds in half over the long length of twine.

To keep the sandwiched diamonds in place, we added a simple X stitch at the bottom corner of the triangle with a needle and thread.

I found thin twine at Joann’s and thought that it gave the flags a nice little shabby chic look. You could use ribbon though (like I did for the sturdier bunting for Liv’s nursery) or really any kind of string you have lying around.

When the flags were strung up we noticed that they started to slide back on top of each other, so as a last minute solution a little dot of Elmers glue was placed on each end of the flag where the fabric meets the twine. Held the flags in place like a charm!

My awesome group of lady friends came over one night to help me assemble all 40 flags which made the process quick and easy, and Liv’s babysitter saved the day when she helped me add dots of glue to the edges of each flag after we realized (last minute) that the flags tended to slide back on top of each other without the adhesive. I was plum out of time and it was super helpful (yay for naptimes).

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Ribbon Flags
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Materials: ribbon of varying widths and colors, fabric strips, twine, baby clothes pins (found at craft stores), onesies or other fun items to showcase

The second bunting-ish project was a ribbon strand that held various lengths of folded over and loosely knotted ribbon, fabric strips and finished onesies from the group craft project (more on that to come – such an easy and fun shower activity!).

This one was so easy to assemble and while I don’t have the best pictures of it, the project is a fun addition as a backdrop to any shower or birthday. I’ve seen these strands strung up behind dessert tables before (without onesies) to add a little color – beautiful! The only bummer is that it requires SO much ribbon. My little strand here was four or five ribbon spools from Joann’s and I’m glad I planned on mixing in the onesies because that’s what really filled the gaps.

The bonus is that the ribbon can be used again and again for all sorts of projects, or even as bunting for a future event.

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For the Bedtime Stories Part 1 post, jump out to this link. Hope to post one more segment soon with details about the iron-on/embroidery onesie craft project (and how easy they were to make as a group!) and my easy-to-assemble solution (without destroying your plates) for tiered food stands.