I never like giving typical gifts for any event, especially baby showers. I feel like my baby showers were such a blur of opening gifts and playing games that you never really remember who gave you those onesies or that pack of diapers. A personalized gift though? They very well may remember that. I am by no means a professional at any of this stuff, but I can look up ideas on Pinterest with the best of them.
My nephew and his new wife were expecting their first child together. I wanted to give them more than just a wrapped pack of diapers. I decided to try my hand at 2 types of gifts related to diapers.
The first is this diaper cake boat. I was so intimidated by this and it really was the easier of the two. For my base, I flattened the diaper box and just wrapped it in wrapping paper (last minute idea when I realized I needed a base). The main part of the boat is a plastic dollar store bin covered in a receiving blanket, but you could use any type of box you wanted. This will also help determine how many diapers you need around it to make the boat shape. I did roll the diapers with rubber bands but tried to leave them loose as I do remember how hard it was to put a rolled-up diaper on a baby. Rolling them allows them to stand freely to allow you to build your boat shape. Once you have it how you like it, you need to wrap it with something to keep it in place. This was the most difficult part for me. I used twine first but as you pull to tighten of course it shifts the diapers a bit. I didn't love the look of it, but it was holding them in place well so then I went around it again with a burlap and hot glued parts of that to the twine to keep it from slipping down. Then I simply filled my basket with goodies and added my fishing pole to round it out. That was made from a simple wood bamboo skewer with twine tied to it and I believe we found the fish in the cat toy section of the store. Surprisingly this didn't slide as much as I feared during transport.
This next basket just gave me a much harder time than that big old boat. I wanted to try to keep these diapers straight and not roll them and it seemed so easy in my head. However, it took many hands to keep them in place while trying to tie something around them to keep them in place. Then the diapers started trying to fold down from the top which was not a problem I had anticipated. I didn't want to ruin the diapers, so I just used some scotch tape and taped them to the basket. The hot air balloon part also did not turn out the way I imagined. The balloon portion is a paper lantern. The one I seen on Pinterest must have been a much larger balloon because the supports were able to come straight down. You would definitely want to use wooden dowels for the support. I again used my bamboo skewers which were not long enough, so I glued two together and reinforced it with twine. This basket didn't hold many gifts or use many diapers, but it was great for a side gift.
For both gifts together, I used one large box of size 3 diapers. I believe there were 110.
I have also tried a version of this hot air balloon without the diapers. It was still cute but not as cute as I would have liked.
The next project I attempted was this elephant with birth stats. I have seen them all over Facebook and Etsy. You could line up your stats however you desired on the ears. The hardest part of this project was there were small pieces of htv. Also, heating on the ear but not trying to touch the animal was difficult but I think you would get it down with practice. My items shifted a bit and I ended up using a hair straightener to get the pieces closest to the animal.
Now onto the shadow boxes. I personally love the one with the hand rolled flowers but let me warn you, there were many finger burns involved in that process. For the design, I bought a layout off Etsy, but you could easily design your own. The rolled flowers are the most time-consuming part of this project.
For my next shadow box, they had told me they were doing the nursery in a superhero theme, so it threw my rolled flowers out of the window. It took me a while to decide how I wanted to incorporate that theme into a shadow box. I eventually decided to go with glitter cardstock as the background and then I used print and cut to make little superheroes out of cardstock, and I glued them onto the background and then added the stats on the glass. It wasn't quite the wow factor I was looking for, but they loved it, nonetheless.
I hope you have enjoyed seeing some of the baby shower gifts I have made. If you have any questions on them, please feel free to reach out.
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