gender neutral baby shower

We recently threw our dear friend Lori a baby shower for her FIRST baby!!! There is just nothing more exciting, huh? We have been “planning” her shower since the day she even spoke about a baby. We couldn’t have asked for a better day!! It was the first day of sunshine and warmth we had had in a while, and it was such a mood lifter. Lori loves her “tea time”, especially ever since our trip to JA together with our husbands’ work family. See here for those photos! So, we opted for a tea party/stork theme. What more could you need for a beautiful afternoon?…. feathers and tea! Ha!

Ok, so all of our little details…

The invite…. beautifully designed and assembled by Lauren @ Rock Paper Scissors. She completely saved us and tied everything together with all of the printed goods you will see throughout the post.

Leah and I scored with a major tulip sale from Whole Foods. Tulips are our fav!!! We used mini tin pails from the Target dollar section as vases. It was so fun to send Lori home with these beauties for her to place around her home! Just a little reminder of her special day and all of those that came to love on her and baby Mahon.

Leah and I gathered as many teacup sets as we could get our hands on! Thank God for thrift stores 🙂 I walked into a Goodwill near my home one day, and literally bought an entire table of teacup sets. They were just waiting to be used for this shower.

Nothing goes better with tea than sweets….duh! Poundcake, scones, macrons, and tea sandwiches were our food groups of choice :). These are food groups, right?

Can we talk about that diaper cake? Leah did such a great job! We always love a good diaper cake that coordinates with the shower theme. They make beautiful center pieces, and are totally practical for the mommy-to-be. We really want to get a tutorial up on the blog for you to see how we make our diaper cakes!

I ended up tying white feathers to aqua thread, and taping each feather to the ceiling and adding other feathers to the bottom of my light fixture to resemble a “nest”. Again, a time consuming project, but it really made for a beautiful centerpiece above the table.

These moss letters were the perfect “springy” touch for our little tea party. I actually left them up for a week after the shower because I have an serious infatuation with moss. Why is it so beautiful??

I simply cut the tops of the letters off with an xacto knife, and just stuffed fresh live moss in there. It stayed beautifully, and took a total of 5 minutes!

Our favorite tea cup find! Isn’t it lovely? Leah totally beat me to the punch when it came to who would get to sip from this beauty while socializing with guests.

These DIY tea tags were by far my favorite touch of the shower! We love showing baby pics of the mom and dad to be, and this was such a unique way to do it. VERY tim3e consuming, but totally worth it. Guests absolutely loved picking their tea and admiring the pictures. You can find the tutorial I followed here. For the tea selections that came without a string, I simply threaded a piece of green and white twine through the tea bag and tied a knot on the end so that I could add a tag 🙂

The absolute cutest “pickles and ice cream” wrapping job by our friend, Lauren!

The stunning mama to be sipping her tea of choice… Tazo Passion tea with a baby pic of her sweet hubby on there of course!

As guests said their goodbyes, we made sure they left with an “egg from the Stork’s nest”. We purchased little EOS organic lip balms for each of them!

As part our #TBT Party Series, we’re sharing Lauren’s baby shower today! Lauren is our bestie and the owner of Rock Paper Scissors, where Jenni and I met and worked pre-babies. It’s quite possibly the cutest and most creative paper boutique… we’re planning a comprehensive post on this later, but for now, here is her baby shower for little Piper (who is turning 2 next week!). She and husband, Tim, wanted a party that wasn’t too girly since it was a couple’s shower, so we decided on a winter white theme. The party was in January and the weather certainly fit the theme. Lauren’s good friends Pauline (who’s gorgeous home you see here), Randi, and sister-in-law Gretchen were the gracious co-hostesses.

We hung parasols from the ceiling using fishing line and clear 3M Command hooks.

All white dessert table with vanilla cupcakes, macarons, meringues, sparkling sugar cookies, and white candy covered oreo truffle pops to match the winter white theme. The middle… is a diaper cake!

Most of the guys were truly disappointed to find out this was a diaper cake and not a real cake. I’ll share the tutorial with you soon! It’s pretty easy and is a great gift for the parents-to-be.

My favorite project to make was this “family tree”. I asked Lauren and Tim’s parents to secretly send me three generations of family photos. I scanned in the photos and made them the same size, mounted them on sparkly white paper to match the theme and hung on a branch spray-painted white. On the bottom level, I hung a blank card that said “Baby Rauter”. Oh, and Maggie, their sweet dog, is on there too! She’s the big sis after all.

Little babies Lauren and Tim!

Instead of a traditional guest book I tied 12 envelopes together, one for each month of Piper’s first year. Then we asked the guests to write advice or encouragement on the cards and place it in the corresponding envelope. Lauren and Tim opened an envelope each month and got to read what their family and friends wrote throughout the year!