Monograms & Margaritas: A Bridal Monogram Shower

The lovely bride to be, Angela, with her sweet mom Jane.

     I am currently sitting in my living room for the 1st time in two weeks without bridal shower banners, balloons, and streamers gracing me with their presence! Haha. Whew! The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of wedding excitement for my little house.  I actually just got done throwing a bridal shower for my sister yesterday, but first I wanted to post about the fabulous shower I got the pleasure of hosting last Saturday with my friend Molly for our mutual friend Angela, who is getting married at the end of October.
    I have SO much to share about all the fun DIY projects that I got to work on for this, but I don't have the time to go into all the tutorials for everything, so I'm just going to give an overview of what Molly and I did for the shower and show you some pictures!
    Now....when my sweet friend Angela told us that she wanted a monogram shower I was a little nervous because I'd never thrown one before, and I wasn't quite sure where to start.  But when I finally sat down and started thinking of ideas and planning, I realized there was a world of possibilities for fun and creative DIY projects.
    The first step of throwing any shower or party is obviously the invitation.  The invitation sets the tone for any shower or party and it's the first thing that guests see, so I knew the invitation had to be cute, classy, fun, and of course "monogram" themed.  Molly and I discussed things and decided to go with a "Monograms and Margaritas" theme.  Hey...adult beverages thrown in the mix never hurts anything, right?? And especially not with our crowd!! :)  I used some digital clipart, frames, and backgrounds I had purchased from Etsy and created this invite to send out to all of Angela's friends and family.

Silhouette Cameo

   The next step was decor!  One of my favorite things to make when I throw bridal or baby showers are party banners!  I think they are so beautiful and add so much to the decor....and they are a breeze to make if you have the right tools!!  One of my favorite new tools for making paper banners of all types is my Silhouette Cameo.  If you've never heard of it, it's basically a Cricut machine...but SO much better!  What sets the Cameo apart is that it is all digital!  No cartridges to store..  You just hook it up to your computer, choose your layout, load your paper, and cut away. It is quite the handy tool for making classroom creations too!  I made both of these banners with my Cameo.  I used scrapbooking paper from Hobby Lobby for the cut outs and photo mounting squares to attach them.  Then I used white ribbon and lavender tulle to tie in between each letter to make a little bit fancy.. :)

Doily scalloped lace banner.

    Another banner I made took no cutting at all and was SUPER easy to make!  All it took was string and doilies folded in half!   The end result was stunning.  Once you fold the doilies in half you get a beautiful lace scalloped banner...I love it!  How simple....why didn't I think of this before?? :)



      Now, you all know with my baking background that there was no way I could have a monogram shower without having monogrammed cupcakes and cookie favors!  I even wanted to pipe monograms onto the chocolate covered strawberries, but I ran out of time and that SOOO did not happen!! :( Sadness.....  But I decided to do monogram toppers for the cupcakes since it's kind of hard to monogram a cupcake.  So I used my Silhouette machine to cut out the purple scalloped circles, and then printed off the "H" circle on my printer and glued it on top of the scalloped cut out.  Then I just taped toothpicks to the back and stuck 'em in!

The cookie favors turned out great too!!  I did the purple icing for the background and piped Angela and her hubby's new monogram on top.  I wrapped them in clear bags and tied them 

with pretty purple ribbon to finish them off! If you want to learn more about how to make hand decorated sugar cookies, see my Step By Step Sugar Cookie Tutorial. 

    As far as food went, we had quite a smorgasbord of goodies! (I just had to use the word "smorgasboard"....it makes me think of Templeton the rat's song from Charlotte's Web! Childhood memories....).  Some things were homemade, like the Gluten Free Cheese Straws (will post recipe later), Mexican Layer Dip (recipe to come) and the Homemade Strawberry Lime Margaritas (OMG!!...They were DIVINE!)..and then some things were store bought like the Publix Chicken Salad on King's Hawaiian rolls and the deli meat/cheeses, veggies, etc. But it was all delicous!  I think the margaritas may have been the top hit, though.  And for good reason...
  

   To further the "Monogram and Margaritas" theme, Molly and I found these awesome chalkboard stickers at Hobby Lobby which we put on the margarita cups.  Then we got some colored chalk and had all the guests write their own monograms on their cups so we would know whose cup was whose. Much classier than Sharpie pens, huh?? :) Everybody loved it!  Who knew they made chalkboard stickers??

    Molly and I also decided that our gifts to Angela needed to be monogram themed too.  So we did some searching and came up with a few good ideas.  The first was a twine wrapped monogram letter which can be used as a wall-hanging or a door-hanging.  We also made a framed monogram display using Angela and Trey's married monogram.  They turned out super cute!  I will post the tutorials for them later.  They were very easy and made great gifts!

                                                                                       
                As a fairly newlywed woman myself, (Is 2 years still a newlywed?? I dunno...) one thing I cherished at my bridal showers was some of the marriage advice I received from some of the ladies at my shower who had been married for many years.  Most advice I got was verbal, but I thought it would be cool to give Angela something to take home with her to remember the

important words of wisdom from all the old married ladies in the room...including myself! Haha.  So I decided to make a "Marriage Advice Tree."  I literally went in the backyard and picked up some sticks and put them in a vase with some pebbles and hung little card stock circles (the design was printed off my computer) on the tree for people to write bits of advice on.  After the shower was over I took them off the tree, bound them, and gave them to Angela.  It was really cute and she got lots of good advice for how to have a long and happy marriage!

Our lovely toilet paper brides.....so beautiful!! :)

     Now, you knew this was coming...it's the SHOWER GAMES!!  I mean, what shower is complete without totally cheesy show games?!?!  I have to admit I LOVE shower games!!  Even the ridiculous ones....they're just so fun! Our first game was a contest to see who could make the best toilet paper wedding dress.  We divided all the guests into 4 teams and gave them two rolls of toilet paper.  They were given 5 minutes to create the perfect dress!  Angela, of course, was the judge.  After the ladies paraded in, Angela picked her winner!
     Another hilarious game we played was called "How Sweet It Is."  It has the guests match candy bar names with certain wedding words and phrases.  It was too funny!! I can take no credit for this game though, because Molly found it.  But it was super fun and had everybody laughing.  We found the game boards on the Love and Weddings Blog.


      All in all, the shower was so much fun and we had a wonderful time!  It was such a pleasure to work with Molly to honor our friend Angela, and we wish her and her hubby to be the best!!  Less than 3 months to go til the big day!!  We love you!