Bridal Shower

My little sister Brianna is getting married May 11th, so Rebecca and I threw her a bridal shower on Saturday, April 7th.  Rebecca had a lot of things to deal with (she has 4 kids!), so I took the reins on the bridal shower.  I went to the internet and pinterest.com to help me with ideas since this was my first bridal shower to throw. 

The biggest thing for any shower is a theme.  I didn't want to resort to just kitchen item gifts or date night gifts, so I found a theme where you assign the guests a letter that would then spell out a message in the end.  The guests would then buy a gift starting with that letter and the bride would then get a variety of gifts.  I used the word 'Congratulations Brianna' to go off of. 

Brianna's colors for her wedding are a dark red and light blue with white as an accent, so I used that a lot in decorations, invitations and food.  It helped me more to go off of a color scheme than a 'Hawaiian' theme or something.

Invitations:  I didn't want to really spend money going to a place to get invitations printed, so I found this website where I could design my own and print it off with my own printer on card stock paper.  I thought they turned out pretty cute.  I had to take a picture of the invitation on my computer because the file is too big to load on the blog.

The food is what I was most excited about.  I love cooking new foods and showing off what I make.  I found out that Brianna likes chicken salad, so I made that the main dish and paired with croissants from Costco (any bread is good from Costco).  Usually there's always some form of vegetables and fruit at a shower, but Brianna isn't a fan of a lot of fruit.  I thought of this frog-eye salad recipe from my mom and found out she liked that and made it.  I should post the recipe for it because it's pretty delicious even though it has a funny name.  I bought a veggie tray and Rebecca got crackers and we had fruit punch and water to drink.  I'll go over dessert separate.

The food was delicious and I'm so glad there were leftovers. :)

I decided to be a little ambitious with dessert and make something I've never made before.  Cake pops are a popular dessert that I've been seeing all over the internet, so I figured why not.  I would be able to incorporate the colors so easily and they didn't look too hard to make.  Boy, was I wrong!  I went over to Rebecca's the Thursday before the shower to make them.  She had made them only once or twice before, so she knew about as much as I did.  I won't go into details, but I will say that there was some struggle in making them and I am glad that they were a hit at the shower.  We put them in Styrofoam blocks with red ribbon and it looked great!  I was so glad that they turned out despite how hard it was to make them.

The decorations went with the color scheme as well and we decided that we didn't need to go excessive on the decorations, so here is what we did.

 I found this idea on pinterest where you can download this template where the circles are the same size as a Hershey kiss and you can put in whatever words and pictures you want, print it out and glue onto the bottom of a Hershey kiss!  It works as a decoration, dessert and favor. 

This banner shows the date of Brianna's wedding.

Whole table view

Rebecca asked Kyle the same questions she asked Scott when she did my bridal shower and recorded his answers.  Brianna then had to see how many she would get right and if not, then a piece of bubble gum went into her mouth.  It was funny to hear her answers compared to his.

The number of girls that came weren't as many as were invited, but I'm glad Brianna was able to get a shower, feel special and see some friends.

I didn't realize how much planning went into any kind of shower, but it was actually pretty fun to do it and I'm glad that everything turned out as I had planned in my head.  Thanks Rebecca for helping me out!