Babyshower in a Box

If you’ve followed along to my recent adventures to London and Paris, you may remember how the primary purpose of the visit was to see my friend Brynn & her husband as they are expecting their first baby in July. Of course, throwing a baby-shower from a continent away is a bit tricky, so my best friend, Molly, and I decided to scale it back to a more travel-friendly version.

Forgive the terrible photos you are about to see. I put this all together late at night 2 days before we left. Mostly because I couldn’t stop it with the pinterest searching and brainstorming — sometimes you just have too many ideas at once, ya know? SO instead of taking my time to set up pretty photos, you’re getting reality. Capish? OK.

First step was to find a pretty way to get things to England without sealing it shut as Murphy’s law would tell you, if you seal anything while traveling, security will require you to tear it open.

To get around this, I decided to cover a hinged shoe box with pretty paper so that the box would LOOK like it was wrapped shut, but still be easily opened if need be.

To wrap the box, my original plan was to use double-sided tape but it was actually easier to use a glue stick. That way the paper made a really smooth, clean edge around the box. And I was able to get the paper really tight along the edges of the lid, making it easier to close.

Forgot to take pictures of the process, but to add the ribbon I put a small strip across the lid, and used hot glue to keep it glued down under the edge of the lid. I did the same thing, but longer around the diameter of the box, width wise as well. If you look, the ribbon lines up as if it went around the entire box, but actually tucks in so that it can still freely open. I glued the bow and heart embellishments on separately afterwards.

As for the fun stuff inside? I decided to include a good amount of clothes, as well as sweets in a good travel-sized bottle, and a rattle too. (Molly and I actually repacked the box at the airport to add in all the adorable goodies she got the baby too. Including a jumper that read ‘American Girl’ which was both adorable and funny given that she will be born to an American mother and English father.)

The baby bottle was filled with Cadbury chocolate eggs – a treat I hoard after Easter. But I specifically picked out only pink and white ones for the bottle.

To bundle the clothes up neatly in the box, I used yarn to tie them up after I rolled them. (Also essentially how I made 10 days of clothes fit in my suitcase. But I used hair elastic instead of yarn)

Once the box was fulled with the gifts, I wanted to add some little extras to tie it all together. And what baby shower is complete without a banner?

As the mommy-to-be is a huge fan of purple, it was clearly part of the theme. I used purple index cards and cut out the triangles. Then on half of them I added a fun matching chevron pattern to add a little something extra.

To spell out ‘It’s A Girl!’ I printed out the individual letters and cut them out in circles before using a glue-stick to add them on.

Finally, I used some hot-glue and pieces of a cute heart trim from the Target dollar spot to link them all together.

I tossed in a few matching balloons and carefully folded the banner up and packaged them ontop before closing the box and nestling it into my ‘personal item’ bag for the flight to England!

Fortunately we didn’t really run into any trouble. They did triple check the bag with the baby shower box, but that turned out to be because I had the baby aquafor in there instead of with my liquids. Oops!

Then we got to give the cute mini-sized gifts to her when we arrived!