showering babies: banners bring joy

this past weekend we threw a shower for our dear friend cory and her little baby on the way.  rach and i scoured the web to find every cute party idea we could find and then got to crafting!  i took a lot of pictures of the "in progress" but took none of the actual shower...can you believe that!?  i think i just wanted to enjoy  the moment.  so...all the dark poor quality pics are from moi and all the bright & pretty pictures of the day-of are courtesy of miss rachel ann.  since we did a lot of projects i think i will break them in to a couple shorter posts instead of 1 hour long read.

first up...our banner for cory. 

i should start by saying - the margrave's are not finding out the gender of their baby beforehand.  listen to me all you pregnant people...this makes it so difficult for your friends to think up things to put on a banner.  no baby names, no "it's a girl" or "it's a boy" phrases, nothing.  so we had to get creative.  what we ended up with..."a baby margrave celebration."  i know that is not normal a unique banner but that's exactly what the day was about...a baby margrave celebration.

we saw the idea {here} from holly with 'life in the fun lane'.  she made a similar banner for her baby's birthday.  we modified a few things but overall, we snatched her idea :)  here's what we did.

once we figured out what the banner was going to "say" i printed off all the letters we would need to make the banner onto cream cardstock.  the letters can be found {here} on marthastewart.com, i use them a lot. a lot. a lot.  i even keep them tabbed in my email now so i always have them right on hand.  each page has 6 versions of the same letter so i only had to print out one sheet of each letter we needed.  i went ahead and cut the left-over letters into little squared and stuck them in a baggie for safe keeping in the craft room until the next time i need some more monograms. 

{original instruction sidenote:  during this stage, our inspiration banner was printed onto regular computer paper, with larger letters and then she tea stained the paper}

rachel was my model during this craft day. after the martha letters were printed we cut around the edges with regular scissors.

{original instruction sidenote: martha stewart says to use a 3" punch to cut these little letters out. if you have a 3" punch you go right on ahead but they cost a small fortune and i already own scissors. it may take a little bit longer but i promise it isn't too bad. especially if you assembly a small team.}

next, i had a big ol' pile of gray card stock laying around the house.  i took a normal size drinking glass & traced circles onto my card stock.  i think i only needed 2 or 3 pages of cardstock to do all the circles for the banner.

we layed everything out to get a good idea of what it would look like.

{original instruction sidenote:  i think at this point our inspiration banner used a glue stick to attach the computer paper to the card stock and then used to rings of glitter on the outside}

next onto the hot glue.  what is a project without some glue guns or a sewing machine?  first we hot glued the two peices of cardstock together.  then we hot glued streamers around the outside of the circle with the letter face down. {sorry we're hot gluing on faith hill}.  if on side was a little bit longer than the other we just trimmed around the edges so that it would look uniform.

here is a finished "A".  hoor"A"y!  

also please note: how excited rach is, the uk game in the background of craft day, jenna's "j" tote from girl's christmas & baby gifts in the corner.  f-u-n!

to finish it off i just hot glued twine to the backside of the letters.  this was trickier than one might think.  i wanted the letters facedown so that i wouldn't have to put hot glue on the carpet but i also had to make sure that the letters were straight up and down {harder than it sounds} and that they were in the right order.  yes, the first line i did i put 5 letters on in backwards order.  geesh!  so i laid them down, facedown, in backwards order so when it flipped it was correct & i drew little vertical lines on the back showing me which part was the top of the letter.  i didn't have that last one down to a science {as  you can see from the crooked letters} but it's kind of charming that way right?  just say yes.

here is the final product...

darling right?

.more shower-ing to come.please stay tuned.

click {here} to see more pics from the big day!