It’s only taken me four months to get this baby shower round-up together! Baby Hue’s shower was magical. It was such a special day. The whole event made Hue feel very real. I did it as much for me as I did it for him because even when your pregnant and showing it’s hard to believe that there will be a baby in your life very soon. It’s such a joy to have all your close friends and family around embracing this little guy who we all haven’t even met yet. (At the time of the shower, we have all met him now and fully love him with all of our hearts.) My sister was helping me pull together the shower and we decided to do afternoon tea, since we do it every year for Christmas Eve and are very comfortable with the menu. My mom was born and raised in England, so an English Tea is literally in her blood and she has passed down this artistry to her daughters. Everything that was done, we did with care and specification to make sure the day was perfect. I will break everything down for you into categories in case you want to throw your own tea party. Here are the categories: Table Top, Menu, Games and Fun Extras. The games will have some printables so you can download for your shower too. The shower got kicked off with these invitations I designed myself.

TABLE TOP

There is A LOT that goes into a tea. English Tea is a tradition my mom doesn’t take lightly and she expects the table to look a particular way and the food to be a certain way. I wanted this to reflect tradition but with my own spin. Let’s start with the table top. For starters, you definitely need a teacup and saucer, luckily my mom has a teacup collection of 50+ teacups. (Some are off limits due to the fact that they are over 100 years old but they are pretty to look at.) My mom also has a large selection of little spoons which we laid on saucer of the teacup. You need a vessel for clotted cream, jam, sugar (and more vessels if you are going to cater to many different kinds of sugars like sugar in the raw and stevia sweetners), and milk. If I had a vegan attending I would have had a milk alternative but I didn’t so milk was the only option. My mom got special sugar cubes with flowers on it and we also had sugar in the raw and regular sugar cubes on the table. The plates were plastic from target they were like 70¢ each but they look like ceramic plates until you touch them. They felt sturdy and more expensive than a paper plate less delicate that a real china plate.

My mom insisted on linen napkins so she had some vintage English and Irish ones and I got a packet of plain white linen napkins from Amazon to fill in the gap. She also bought these little crackers that are on the plate. We had Christmas crackers every year growing up at Christmas dinner. It’s an English tradition where you and a friend pull the two ends of the cracker like a wish bone and it pops as you break it, all the stuff inside comes flying out. The ones we had growing up always came with a crown, a toy and a joke and were much larger. These were dainty and small and had very traditional, lady like quotes in them. I had some extra confetti from the DIY baby reveal boxes when I told my family I was pregnant. You can see that DIY here. I scattered the confetti down the middle of the table from end to end.

I had been collecting little jars for a couple months before. Anytime I was cleaning out a bottle of spaghetti or a jam jar I saved it for the flowers. I had a lot of options the day of. I got the roses from Trader Joe’s. In my opinion they have the best selection of flowers. They last forever. I went to the flower mart in downtown L.A. once on a lunch break and I think I spent $15 to enter and the flowers lasedt like maybe 24 hours. I was super disappointed in the quality. TJ’s flowers + roses are beautiful, they last for at least a week and you cannot beat the price. I think I spent no more than $15 or $20 on flowers and the vases were all up-cycled. I got the linen from H&M Home. Love their home line. They have the best stuff for a great price.

Candy is what I decided should be the goody bag/take home present. A little thank you for coming to Baby Z’s celebration. I have a friend who has slowly turned me into a full Sugarfina Candy snob. Their luxury candy is SO good. It’s a little on the pricey side but it is completely worth it. I got their 2.5 LB bulk bags. I got some very small jam jars from target. I had the blue string on hand from a different project and I always have a bunch of pastry wax paper on hand which I used for the cover securing with the string and I designed, printed and cut the thank you tags. I chose Sugar Lips, Sparkle Pops and Robin’s Egg Caramels from Sugarfina because those happen to be my favorite flavors.

MENU

The menu is pretty much what we have every year for Christmas Eve Tea but I changed it up a bit. I have a lot of vegetarian friends and family so I made sure there were plenty of options for them. I took away Bakewell tarts (little almond tarts with jam filling) because I decided to replace that with butter cookies already made from a bakery, where we also got all the fresh bread from. My mom order petit fours for the big day. My sister and I made all the sandwiches and scones ourselves. The sandwich selection has been tailored to our family’s favorite tea sandwiches that have been established through the years of making them. I made my favorite Blackberry, lemon and poppyseed scones + my sister made plain for the purest scone lover. There was clotted cream, lemon curd and blackberry jam on the table for the scones. My dad and I made the sausage rolls, regular and vegetarian friendly, a couple of weeks ahead of time and froze them until the big day. I didn’t really take any pictures during the shower of the food. I was too busy enjoying all the food and company! I designed, printed and cut out all the menus tucking them under each plate. You can download a printable of the ready to print menus here.

My sister made me a cake too! Which was really nice + delicious. Tea is awesome because you have a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Your full and never quite full the whole time… Isn’t her cake pretty?

GAMES

HOW MANY WEEKS WAS STEPHANIE WHEN SHE WAS HOLDING A…

This is a personal project I was working on while I was pregnant. I would get the fruit or vegetable my baby was for that week and have a friend who is also a photographer take my pic. We had it down by the third trimester. I was really proud of this project, the fact that I had been so dedicated + it was really cool to see my tummy grow. I know it will be cool for Hue to see how he grew too! I plan to make it a video but I thought it would be cool to put the pictures on some old wood we had in the garage. I was half way done making this and I thought this could totally be a game! And then I decided to design a game to go with these pictures. It turned out like this:

People got super into it. It was awesome because it was a surprise game even for me! I was about two months away from giving birth at the time so obviously I didn’t have all the weeks but their was quite a bit!

WHATS IN YOUR PURSE? + WHO KNOWS STEPHANIE BEST?

My sister was in charge of games. The week of the shower she was sending me games that she was going to buy. As a graphic designer I was like I can make these and keep the theme consistent to the rest of my paper goods. So, I added one more thing on my plate and designed these games. I made her in charge of the winner gifts. We actually didn’t end up playing whats in your purse because I don’t know why? But I think she was afraid we were going too game crazy! This game is not personalized so I will add it here if you want to use for your party!

HANGING CLOTHES WHILE HOLDING A CELLPHONE + CARRYING A BABY

This game was fun! My friend Ivanna( who is hiding behind the blue clothing in the first picture and is to the left of me in the second picture) set this game up for the shower. She timed everyone too. The whole point is to see how many clothing items you can hang while holding the phone and carrying the baby under a minute. I was awful at this game but it was still a lot of fun!

FUN EXTRAS

PHOTO STATION

We had a photo station with a polaroid camera. I had an extra stool that we kept the camera on. I have a lot of extra wood in the garage so I grabbed one and nailed 6 nails on each side. Tied a string on each side and added these gold clothespins. Then after we took a picture we hung it up on the board! My friend Andrea lent me the camera and film which was so awesome and she took most of the pictures! I have them all and they are super special. Plan on putting them in a book.

FASCINATORS

So I got this idea from The House That Lars Built.

I had a bunch of friends come over a couple of weeks before the shower and we sat around my dining table and made these fascinators and told jokes and ate lots of snacks! It was a lot of fun. I kind of epically failed at this too because the reference recommends a head band and I got metal clips instead that were too stiff. We used similar clips for my work blog post for hair bowties that worked great and were not stiff but the ones I got were horrible. They were really hard to open and kept popping off the fascinators. My niece was glue gunning them back on at the shower but the clips just kept breaking off the fascinator. I went through a couple and was afraid to touch it and break it so by the end it kind of floated to the top of my head and looked like an angel’s halo! So, next time it’s all about using headbands!

   

PICK YOUR FAVORITE NAME FOR BABY Z!

So, obviously Jake and I had already chosen the name but I was curious what the most popular name would be! I kind of was taking a fun poll I guess. When everyone sat down for tea my sister announced that there was a pom pom in their teacup. At some point during the tea they were to take a look at the name table and choose their favorite by putting their pom pom in the jar! Here is the end result:

Hue and Henry were neck and neck. I can’t remember if Henry or Hue won but Hue already had been chosen. His name are family names from both sides. Hue is from my Uncle Bert (said with a very heavy Irish accent) on my side – my Irish father’s brother and Abraham is from Jake’s Uncle “A” on his side. Henry was an uncle on both sides and I was kind of stuck on Hunter for a while but that was just a name I liked. Since Hunter is not a family name, it was never going to be picked. Hue is a great name because my uncle Bert was named after his uncle Hugh and now it has now come full circle with us calling our baby Hue! When everyone was leaving they wanted to know the name and I counted in front of everyone and then I announced the name! Which I didn’t know I was going to do but everyone wanted to know! It’s so funny because whenever we are at the doctors they call him by his full name Huebert (we chose to spell it differently than the traditional Hubert spelling) which is so old-fashioned but we love it and we love Hue!

It was so much fun! The day started off all gloomy and cloudy and was perfectly sunny by noon. We all put our pinky’s in the air. Drank lots of tea. Ate a ton of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. There were games and SO MANY presents for Hue! It was a perfect day. It made my excitement for Hue even more so!