Prepping for Owl-themed Baby Shower

My highschool pal's upcoming baby shower that I'm co-hosting will have an owl theme. And even though owls have been popular for a while now, I've always wanted to host an owl party. I started off finding some inspiration on Pinterest (Pin-spiration?) and created a board just for the shower. 

Inspiration: canning jar favors filled with pretzels. I didn't really like the feather but liked the idea of filling a glass jar with snacks that doubled as decoration.

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Inspiration: owl paper lantern. Seemed super easy and would be cute to hang from the tea lounge's ceiling.

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My spin on the owls: no feather, scalloped eyes minus glued on googly ones, and wings in different brown+blue patterns (since baby is a boy). My other HS pal and I made 20 of these babies in about 1.5 hours. The only really time-consuming part of the project was tracing and cutting out the 40 wings (I had just free-handed a template for the wings so they were all the same size and shape). 

Instead of needing to buy pretzels or another snack in bulk, I decided on using kettle popcorn that I'll heat up in the microwave night before the shower. The sticker message on the lid reads: "Hoo's going to pop? Thank you for coming to Rebecah's baby shower".  I know, slightly "corny" huh? Okay, I'll stop with the puns but was happy with my original little tagline :).

Watcha looking at?

Since the owl lanterns will be hung atop a long rectangular table seating guests on both sides, we wanted to make sure people on either side could see the owl faces. So each owl lantern has eyes and beak on the front and back. This little owl family (plaid wings/eyes for baby and pink and blue for mommy and daddy) is now keeping guard in my bedroom as I sleep.

And you know what's great? The mama-to-be can hang these owls in her new nursery as decoration (Rebecah, I'm hoping you're not reading my blog and having your surprise ruined. Just act surprised if you are reading :)! Audrey actually asked if these were for her, so I may have to make her some soon!

The shower is in a week, so stay tuned for the other party details :).

Clothing Swap Party: Summer Edition!

I ended up not taking many photos of our clothing swap party bc I assumed Steph was being the event photographer. But she was busy being a good hostess and making sure guests were mingling that she wasn't snapping away either. So I unfortunately don't have lots of pictures to share, but we did have a good turnout and all the snacks were super easy to prepare so I wasn't at all stressed out. I did lose my voice a few days prior, so was sad that I sounded like a man :(.

A few guests asked me for the peanut butter fruit dip recipe, so I'll share it here since I modified a Pinterest find: equal parts yogurt and peanut butter (creamy) plus a dollop of fruit jam if you're using vanilla yogurt instead of fruit-flavored yogurt. I think Greek yogurt would be too thick for mixing with the PB, but it might work? The original recipe called for lots of powdered sugar, but I thought it was sweet enough without so skipped it altogether. Do you like the chalkboard frame I made? 

It's for sale on my Etsy shop!

See recipe for lemonade and straw flags how-to here.

To prevent confusion over where to hang/lay clothing items that happened at our first swap, I created little category tags. I just Googled some stock images, took a screen shot, and re-sized the images to be larger. I know... a bit ghetto, but did the job.

This time around, we didn't impose any rules that only allowed participants to leave with the same number of items they brought. It was basically a free for all since there was so much clothing. In fact, even after everyone did double and triple checks to make sure they got all they wanted, we still ended up with 3 large bags of clothing for Goodwill. So yay! Good fun for a good cause!