My Best Friends Bridal Shower

In December I had the honor of throwing my BFF, Alyssa, a Bridal Shower. We met when I was 11 and she was 10 at children’s church called Wings and we’ve been best friends ever since. #bffatfirstsight I cannot believe shes been my friend for over 15 years! Since we were little, it was always our plan to be in each others wedding and it was a given that shed be my Maid-of-Honor and I’d be hers. It just so happens she decided to get married first, so I had the privilege of being the first MOH and she the first Bride! It was my first time throwing a shower and it was so fun! I love planning, delegating and decorating, so I had  tons of fun making this day special for Alyssa. My mom was kind enough to host the shower at our house! (Thanks Mom!)

My first duty as the MOH was to design the Bridal Shower invitations. I could have just found pre-made invitations at Target or on a website like Minted but I wanted her shower to be as personalized and unique to her as possible. I decided to design the invites myself. I got the inspiration for the invitations from a clothespin Alyssa had in her room. The clothespin had the exact same floral print as the invites, just in different colors. I had Alyssa send me a picture of the clothespin in her room and I used that picture to trace the floral print in Illustrator. The colors were inspired by magazine clippings I had laying around my computer when I was designing the floral pattern. There were different shades of greens and pinks on the magazine pages and I decided to just use that as my color scheme. I played around a bit with the flowers, colors and fonts and within a few days I had the invitations ready send to the printers. Originally I wanted to print the invitations with gold foil but it turned out to be way out of my budget. The printers would have needed to make custom metal printing plates to print any gold on the invites so I just ended up keeping the original colors I designed the invitations with. I had the invites printed at a local printing place called Flamingo Printing. I had them cut rounded edges on all of the invites to give it more of a feminine look. Once they were finished, I mailed them out as quickly as possible to ensure our guests had plenty of time to RSVP! Oh the anticipation.

As our shower guests arrived, the pallet board I designed for Alyssa as a decoration was the first thing they saw.

When I first started planning the Bridal Shower, I knew I wanted to make Alyssa and Issac a pallet board sign with this Song of Solomon verse that they could use to decorate their apartment with in the future.  Immediately after I designed the invites I started to make the pallet board. My friend Lucy came over to help me paint and after a few sketches on paper, we settled on using the same floral print as the invites just on a larger scale. I really love how the board turned out! It was also used in the wedding but to better match the colors, I re-painted the bright pink a soft baby pink color with detail. (Don’t mind Ella, my parents foster baby in the corner.) DIY to come soon!

I knew I wanted to have a guest book for Alyssa that had notes of encouragement written in it from her closest family and friends. I bought a 3 pack of Notebooks from Rifle Paper Co and just used one as the guest book. To decorate the area, I used my moms antique dresser and put fake flowers in Mason Jars that I had used for previous craft projects.

The two games we played were, Pin the Mustache on Isaac (her now husband), and “Who Said What”. For the second game we interviewed Isaac and Alyssa separately and asked them a serious of questions and then had our guests guess which statement was from who. Both games were equally entertaining and had everyone laughing.

That’s my BFF or as she likes to say her, “BAEff”.

Since her shower was in December, my mom came up with the best idea! Her idea was that everyone should bring Alyssa their favorite Christmas ornament for their her and her fiance’s first Christmas together. Turns out it was the best idea ever! I had printed a small note to remind the guests to bring their fav ornament and put it inside the invite envelopes. All of the guests brought the most adorable ornaments and we hung them on my fake pink Christmas tree. This was probably my favorite thing about the shower besides hanging with all of our friends!

Thanks for all of your help guys! The Bridal Party from left to right (Kelly, Amanda, Me, Alyssa, Sarah, Michelle and Patti).

Romper is from LOFT.