DIY French Themed Baby Shower

My sister is having a baby!!!! We held the baby shower last weekend and unfortunately I am just now getting around to posting about it! For the shower, I planned the entire thing but I had a LOT of help executing all my big ideas. To start: the theme. My sisters name is Jaclyn and one of the names she is considering for the baby is french as well so I thought a french theme with a lot of white, pale pink (its a girl!), and greenery would be perfect!

As I always do with events like this, Pinterest is my go-to. You can see my “Aunt Life” board here, which is where I got all of my inspiration and ideas. Grab a snack for this post because I am a “do it yourself” kind of girl and this post is going to be a long one!!

The invite:

I made these cute invites online and I am so sad because I can’t find the link where I made them! They turned out really cute and I wanted to post them for two reasons: 1) the Diaper raffle was a total success (I just handed everyone a number when they walked in and went out and bought a 5 dollars Starbucks gift card for the winner), and 2) Hayden’s mom (who hosted the shower) made this adorable sign to look like the invite so the guests would know they were at the right place:

It turned out so well! She used a normal board, sprayed it with chalk board spray paint and then used a chalk marker to write out the sign. Plus those flowers matched perfectly!

Food and Decor: 

Ok unfortunately I don’t have great pics of every individual thing we did (probably because there was a lot) but here we go.

I had seen Mom-osa bars on Pinterest and since the shower was at 11 o’clock in the morning it was the perfect drink! I made this cute little Mom-osa sign as well as the little signs for the types of juices. Jaclyn’s best friend, Jess, grabbed strawberry lemonade, classic oj, and cranberry juice, a couple of bottle of champs, and some berries to garnish with. Hayden’s mom had some plastic cups that I’m sure you could get from Hobby Lobby or even King Soopers. I found these glass bottles to put the juice in at Hobby Lobby for 50% off! We also had water infused with mint and cucumber, and some coffee.

This “Bonjour Bèbè” was so fun and easy to make! I bought the burlap banner from hobby lobby and then cut out triangles from white cardstock and wrote in calligraphy on there, then glued them to the burlap. I loved the way it turned out!

I WISH I had taken closer pictures of all the food, but this is what we are working with ^^. The main food item was my mom’s beef salad (Jaclyn’s favorite) stuffed into croissants, wrapped in parchment paper, and tied with twine for a little extra detail. They are in the back left of this picture, and even though you can’t see them well, they were adorable, served up in a white wood box. On the right of the picture we had a charcuterie board with cheeses, crackers, and grapes. We also added some fake leaves from Hobby Lobby under the cheese to make it look even prettier on the granite boards. The party was pretty big (21 people), so we also had snacky stuff like a veggie plate, watermelon, chips, and mixed nuts. Hayden’s mom, Karen, also made butter mints which you can see on top of the white platter. We served the food on clear plates that Karen had, and I just bought some dark green and marble napkins to match everything.

The most important food item (that you can hardly even see in this picture- look left and right of the cake) were the macaroons! Karen is an amazing baker, and when I told her I planned on going and buying just a few macaroons to decorate with (which cost an arm and a leg), she decided to try making a practice batch herself and they ended up being awesome!! We spent all of Friday before the shower making the macaroons (and the cake, which I will get to in a sec) and even though they were a TON of work, they ended up being totally worth it. If you are interested in how we made the actual cookies, leave me a comment and I will do another post all about the recipe and how to cook them perfectly, but until then all you need to know is that we made green ones with a lemon filling, and pink ones with a rasberry filling.. yum!

Also, in the top right of this picture you can see a mason jar filled with baby’s breath and wrapped with twine. We had these all throughout the house and it added such an elegant, pretty touch. I loved it!

Last but not least- an “It’s a Girl!” sign…. because its not a baby shower without one.

The cake: 

The cake gets its own section of this post because it was my pride and joy of the event. I had a very clear image in my head of what I wanted the cake to look like, and this nailed it right on the head. The term used for this style of icing is called a “naked cake” since you can see the cake itself peeping through the icing. Karen baked the cake to perfection (vanilla) and we stuck it in the freezer to make it easier to handle while icing. I used a big knife to cut off the domes of the cakes and flatten them out so they would be easy to stack on top of one another. We used a lot of cream cheese frosting in between the cakes to get them to stick together, then iced the cake like you would normally, and then used a scraping tool to get the “naked” look. We decorated it with the same leaves we used under the charcuterie board and some light pink flowers. It turned out PERFECT.

The games:

When the guests first walked in we had a station where they could play two small games. The first was a guessing game of when Baby G will be born! Her due date is October 11th so that one was off the market, but other than that everything was up for grabs! I got this poster board with the gold glitter boarder from Hobby Lobby and just made the sign and calendar myself. The pink baby feet stickers are also from Hobby Lobby… protip- you could also use stamps!

The other game at this station was “Dear Baby” where you could write Baby G a little note. I made this template myself in a word doc because from all the templates I was finding online there were some blanks that I liked and some that I didn’t, so I thought, “what the heck, I can totally make this!” and I love the way it turned out. So many people participated and now Baby G will get to see just how loved she already was when she gets old enough to go back and read them.

After everyone had eaten and before we opened presents we played two more games: the first of which was called “Who’s that baby!?” For this I just got a black poster board from Hobby Lobby, wrote the title cute, printed off pictures of super well known celebrities when they were babies, glued them on there, added some fun boarders, and wallah! This game ended up being super fun. I just had everyone keep track of their own score and the winner got a little soap from World Market.

The second game we played is similar to Scategories (a game my family and I love) except for you name things that relate to babies for letters A through Z. I found this template for free online so I just printed out a bunch of copies! We gave everyone about 6 or 7 minutes to fill theirs out, and then we went around the room letter by letter calling out what we had written. If you wrote the same thing as someone else, your scores cancel and you get zero points for that letter. If you come up with something original, you get a point. Some of the answers were a stretch and people would have to make a case for why what they’d written related to babies and then everyone else would chime in on whether they should get a point or not. It was really funny and took up a good amount of time!

The favors:

Last but certainly not least, for the party favors we gave out our macaroons that we had worked so hard on! I got little plastic boxes from Hobby Lobby and some shredded decoration paper to fill some space. We put two macaroons in each, tied a bow around it, and then I wrote out little tags that said “Merci!” to stick with the french theme. They turned out so cute and some of the guests even asked where we had got them because they thought they were store bought! A true validation that they turned out as good as we had hoped.

A special thanks to:

Karen, my mama, the rest of the Wages, and Jaclyn’s friend Jess for all of the help setting up, preparing for, and decorating for the party!

The guests for coming and participating- it was so fun!

And of course, my shissy (and Brian!), for finally giving me a niece!! I can’t wait to be Baby G’s auntie!! <3 Love you both!