Little Tiny Baby Sized Gifts

You may have noticed a theme with some of the crafts on this blog lately. They’re less goth-y and more baby. That’s because I have been blessed. No, not that. My husband and I are still very happy dog owners. But my fabulous younger sister is giving me the best Christmas present ever: A NIECE! To say I am excited is a bit of an understatement. But I know that baby gifts are not everyone’s cup of tea, so never fear! We will be returning to crafting fails and terrible puns after the first of the year (with some baby gifts sprinkled around. Natch). But before I jump off of the baby train, we have one more baby related craft for you. The good news is that this can be used in non-baby related functions. Friends, I present to you: the baby shower centerpiece.

The shower was held on a day in October, which naturally lent itself to a fall theme. Of course, being Chicago, it also snowed that day. Gotta love the midwest. I was in town for less than a week and I somehow managed to experience all four seasons.

The shower itself was magical, though, full of friends and family and love and lots of presents. And, of course, excellent decorations. My mother and I were tasked with table decor, a task that we were completely up to and absolutely did not freak out about at all.

Okay, we may have freaked out a little. But it was a big responsibility! Luckily, we calmed down when we actually decided what we wanted to do. We decided to go with a “rock-a-bye baby theme” for the centerpieces, specifically focusing on the concept of the baby in the treetop. Which...have you ever actually thought about the words to that song? It’s really dark. Maybe there’s more goth to babies than I originally thought.

I can take almost no credit for the actual vases that were used in the centerpieces. Those were the brainchild of my brilliant mother. Right down to the branches that she ordered off of the internet and had my father carve down to size with a hacksaw.

My contribution to the babies in the treetops was finding the vintage style buggies that they were laying in. And while all of that Etsy and Amazon time certainly honed my research skills I wouldn’t call it a meaningful creative contribution. Luckily, I got to exercise my creative muscle with some other baby related decor. Namely, blocks. I’ll be really honest with you, I’m not actually sure if babies still play with blocks. It has been well documented on this blog that I don’t know anything about babies. However, I do know that blocks are generally associated with babies and that was good enough for me.

Our initial plan was to hang the blocks on the trees but that turned out to be easier said than done. Ultimately we decided against drilling holes in small wooden blocks so we could attempt to run a string through them and decided, instead, to glue them together in little stacks. Babies stack blocks, right? Sure they do!

It still didn’t feel like enough, though. It wasn’t EPIC. This is my niece. She deserved ALL of the decorations.

So, naturally, I did what any good crafter would do: I turned to Pinterest for inspiration. And it was there that I found baby pumpkins. They were perfect! Little pumpkins dressed as sleeping babies. Like Jack-O-Lanterns, but cuter. I pitched the idea to my artistic partners (aka my parents) and they were skeptical at first, but I knew I could pull it off. After all, I just needed pumpkin and pacifiers!

Okay, it was maybe a little easier said than done. The first struggle I ran into was affixing the pacifiers to the pumpkins. See, the thing is, pumpkins don’t have mouths. I know, you’re shocked. So I couldn’t just stick the pacifier in the pumpkin mouth and hope for the best. At first I tried glue. I was sure it would work. I had total confidence in my crafting abilities. My father had his doubts.

My father was right.

I sat there and defiantly held a glue soaked pacifier against a pumpkin. It fell off. I pressed harder. It fell off again. Finally my father suggested a nail. I protested that it would show through. He assured me that it wouldn’t. Once again, my dad was correct.

Well, fine. I hadn’t mastered the art of attaching pacifiers to pumpkins. Whatever. I could still make the pumpkins look sleepy and angelic. All I had to do was draw some eyes with puffy paint. I’m a master of puffy paint. It’s in my DNA. My mom used to puffy paint sweatshirts and sell them. I grew up with the stuff!

I drew several practice sleepy eyes for my baby pumpkins. But none of them looked sweet. They looked a little..sinister. Even when I wasn’t trying my goth side was coming out. And then Dad swooped in to the rescue again.

“What about false eyelashes?” he suggested.

False eyelashes? FALSE EYELASHES! It was brilliant! And a lot easier than drawing eyelashes on with puffy paint. Shout out to the hours of YouTube makeup tutorials that I’ve watched. Gluing on the eyelashes was a cinch.

All in all, I think the centerpieces turned out very well. They were artfully arranged and appropriately adorable.

And the Mom-to-Be loved them, which is really the most important thing.

It’s been a lot of fun to fete my niece before her birth but, you know what? I think it will be even better once she’s actually here.