Who doesn’t love a good party? I don’t just love the party, I love preparing for one!

So, I had an opportunity to do two things I love….Bless someone and organise!

Last year I had the opportunity to bless a friend by assisting in throwing her a baby shower. And as much as I love boys, throwing a shower for a little girlie ticks lots of my boxes.

THE AIM: Keep it cost effective while keeping it visually pleasing and blessing a friend!

Before starting the process, I started making some lists of what areas I needed to cover. Oh man, I cannot explain what making list does to me, getting ready to sort out a potential mess……it’s a like a cool breeze on a hot day! So, with me in my happy place I went to making my list…..

THE List:

• Colour pallet/theme
• House décor
• Table décor
• Cake
• Food
• Drinks
• Party games
• How we are going to have the special mom open her presents

Colour Pallet – It is important to decide on what your theme is going to be and for that matter your colour pallet. I decided on a “vintage pink” which included dusted pink, white and muted browns.

House Décor – this was not too difficult as I went to my go-to decorations Bunting ( see Bunting vs Bunting ). I also included some large ‘paper balls’ hanging from the ceilings.

Table Décor – I wanted to use the Cake as my focus point with food surrounding it.

• I used my nice white tablecloths, which in truth doesn’t get pulled out that often with dirty little testosterone hands roaming my house.
• In order to make some table confetti I used paint sample strips and punches flowers and heart shapes out of them. OK, so you might we wondering how many of these sample strips I needed to get. A LOT….and yes, I am pretty sure that the guy working in the paint section must have thought I was TOTALLY crazy!!

Cake – I wanted a BIG cake as it would be the centre piece of my table décor.  BUT (wow, I do use that word a lot when trying to explain anything about ‘cake’) I was pretty sure that the ladies coming to shower would not be able to eat the whole cake. And so the best next option was the Nappy Cake (see Nappy Cake )

Food – These days food can become rather expensive, so I decided to make most of the food and asked some close friends to the preggie mommy to bring a plate of eats. The idea with eats for an afternoon shower was that it should be easy finger foods with probably more savoury than sweet. And not to forget some healthy options for all those on “healthy eating plans”.  A few examples tiropita (greek cheese triangles), baklava (greek nuts and syrup rolls), bougatsa (greek custard filled rolls) , brownies, scones, small tea sandwiches. Oh and I also put popcorn in pink dotty packages….just because it is pretty!

Drinks – Except for serving tea and coffee, I thought it to be wise to have a juice and water in separate dispensers. I used mason jars with pretty straws as glasses as well. Pretty, pretty straws

Party games – It is very important to make sure that your guest of honour is happy with party games! Some people love getting silly and some don’t. For this party we were going with the latter, so in order to have a little bit of fun, I set up two stations…..

• Station 1: Guess what is in the bag – Without looking you had to put your hand into the baby bag and guest the baby items. Each correct guess gives you a point.
• Station 2: How many pink marshmallows? – In a jar filled with pink and white marshmallows you needed to guess the amount of pink marshmallows

Once we were all seated, ready for opening the presents, we played one last game. I had a list of things that people would possibly have in their bag and as I read them out, each person could give themselves a point for the item that was in their bag. After all the fun the winners were announced and got a jar full of jelly beans.

How we are going to have the special mom open her presents – Our guest of honour isn’t fond of the spotlight, but we felt that she needed to open the presents in front of her guests. So in order to take the spotlight off her every guest would got one turn to guess what was in a present (and not the one that they had given).

After all the oo’s and aa’s, I hopefully made the guest of honour feel very special….as that was the whole point!

This made me realise again that I don’t want to just bless someone because there is an occasion. So as my King blesses us without any occasion, I will keep on allowing Him to let me bless people around me without occasion!

Share if you like this….as sharing is caring!

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This week will again be “All about the cake, yes the cake, o’ trouble, all about the cake, ‘bout the cake, o’trouble”

Couldn’t resist! Did I make you sing that line….haha, I did!

Please do not get me wrong….I LOVE CAKE, especially baked cheesecake (hint to whoever wishes to spoil me with a piece). BUT (yes that word again), there is always cake left at parties except maybe if you have 25 teenagers on a growth spurt.

So I continue to explore what else will work at a party, and this time it will be at a Baby Shower!

Every culture has it’s own traditions on baby showers and where I come from we eat, play games, celebrate and watch the pregnant mom open pressies. Last year I had the privilege of helping arrange a baby shower for a friend and as it was for little baby girl I couldn’t resist doing a Vintage, Soft Pink Party.

Note: If you read the “who I am” section you will see that I have a testosterone filled house, thus pink and pretty isn’t really what floats the majority of the Greenhouse boat

Excitement!! I love throwing parties and making people feel special!

(I will share more about the party in one of my future posts)

As the Cypriot blood runs deep, I always seem the need to feed or maybe the correct word is ‘overfeed’ the guests. I am sure deep down I am worried that the guest would have missed the previous meal or may skip the meal ahead. And so I bake and make food for Africa!

But the cake, oh the cake….the one thing that I am very sure there will be a lot left over of is where I needed to become creative. And so, my search on Pintrest starts for non-edible cakes. I found a bunch of picture of fabulous nappy cakes and decided to try my hand at it.

I gave myself two guidelines:

1. Be as economical as possible – there was so much else I wanted to do for the party
2. Use as much of the stuff I have at home

With this in mind, I landed up with one pack of nappies (a gift by another friend for the guest of honour) and lots of odds and ends from my “office”.

So, only having one pack of nappies I realised that I had to become creative in getting the cake to look “full”. So instead of rolling every nappy up (as traditionally done), I made a fake inside for every layer with toilet rolls and then layered the nappies one on top of another around each layer. Using ribbon, I tied each layers nappies together.  For some more decoration I used the negative sides of the paint swatch samples that I made confetti out of. To top off the cake I made bunting from ribbon, rope and kebab sticks. And VOILA, you have a nappy cake!

I was hoping to have more photos but for some reason didn’t take any photos during the stages building as I didn’t think I was going to share this with anybody (eeeek, and look at me now! Sharing is caring)

If you need more guidance, I would suggest googling and youtubing as there are amazing stuff out there!

(my spell check says that there is no such words….but what the heck, some new words for the dictionary!)

Happy Cake making!!

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Before I begin I would like to clarify that this post is full of carbohydrates and no Tim Noakes! I don’t do Banting as my Greek genes overwhelm every thought of cutting carbs from my eating plan. I do think my jeans might benefit from me banting, but in the same breath – I do not think it will ever happen!

So while everyone else is busy banting I am busy bunting! I am not a serial Bunter, but I Bunt when I need to.

NOTE: I am pretty sure these are not real words, but as “bootilicious” can make it into the dictionary maybe “bunter” can as well.

I love the look of bunting hanging beautifully from the ceilings and walls to decorate a special occasion, or for that matter any occasion. However my first introduction to bunting was far from the pretty that we all know now. About 15 years ago when I started working at an Incentive Travel company the only bunting that was around was the ones that you could find on a cruise ship and the ones you had to make for your client with their company logo all over them (not so pretty). Thankfully a creative brain can change something not so pretty into something really pretty! Bunting can be made of any material you wish/like and in any shape you like. I love the traditional triangle bunting and have a few new materials I want to try and make bunting out of as soon as I have time (interpretation: It is going on my long list of  “want to do’s”) and hopefully I will be able to show something on my blog when it is done one day.

I have had a number of parties that I have done that I have used bunting for decorations. I thought I would share how to make some easy-peasy paper bunting

You will need:

• A stencil of your bunting shape(will explain how to make one below)
• Sheets of different coloured paper
• Scissors
• Glue stick
• String

For the stencil: Cut out of hard cardboard the shape (triangle, circle, square) you would like your bunting to be. This will be your “master” and you can keep it for all future bunting.

How to make it:

1. Lay the paper out on a flat surface with the front to the bottom. If you have very thin paper you can even layer your paper on top of each other.
2. Mark your triangles with a pencil. Try to get as many triangles in next to each other in order not to waste paper.
3. Cut the triangles out with a sharp scissors.
4. Once you have all your triangles you can start to paste them onto the string.Your length will be determined by how much string you are using.

How to make bunting

Tips:

• If you are measuring a space to put the bunting up, take into account that bunting hangs. You will thus need to make your string at least half to three-quarters longer than your measured space.
• Vary your patterns and even the colours of your paper to create interesting bunting
• Eat at least one piece of carbohydrates whilst doing your bunting ….preferably a piece of cake

When you have your next party and wonder how to quickly do up the room….BUNT!!!

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