Really? I haven't posted in over a month. Well, it's official, I am terrible at this! This weekend I hosted another party, this time at home. It was a baby shower for my wonderful friend Miss Dottie, who inspires me in many ways. In fact she is a blogger as well (though for real, not just randomly once a month)- and I'm going to "borrow" some of her topics for my posts on here (read: plagiarize). Last year she kicked off the new year with a list of the new recipes she had tried during the course of 2007, and I found it monumentally inspiring. I've made my list, still checking it twice, but will be posting it up shortly.
Besides being incredibly smart, creative and fun; another way Miss Dottie inspires is with her genuine ability to make you feel like the most important person in the world, be you a near stranger or an old friend. She has a quality to her kindness that is pure and immeasurable. Therefore, it was an honor for me to be able to host her baby shower and gather up her closest lady friends for a day of bestowing love onto her.
Because Miss Dottie is so darn crafty, I knew from the get go that this would need to be a sophisticated but homemade affair. And because Miss D is so humble, it had to also be unfussy.
So firstly, the food- I kept it very, very simple- 2 kinds of seasoned nuts- coconut curry macadamias, and ginger scented pecans- both tried and true Martha recipes. Then an assortment of aram style sandwiches- smoked salmon cream cheese with cucumber, sun dried tomato tapenade, and turkey with hummus and more tapenade. Finally finished out the menu with some dips- a warm spinach artichoke dip that was cheesy but not out of control, green goddess dip with assorted veggies, and my famous coconut curry cheese ball served with rice crackers and cucumber for dipping. A friend of Miss D's made the world's cutest cake (see above. I wish I could lay claim to that bit of adorable, but no.)
Next, the decor- the baby's room is going to be white with red trim, so I decided to create a long banner of flags that Miss D could keep and use in the baby room should she so decide. To begin, I found my supplies at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. If you live in the Bay area and don't know this place, ACQUAINT yourself. Really. Do it.
In any case, when I went in last time they had an
amazing amount of rubber stamps with ribbon motifs. So of course I bought up a bunch of them (ricrack, gingham, dots, lace, ruffles...), I also got some great red and white themed fabric, and some white fabric as well. Oh, and some 2" red and white checked bias tape, like a billion yards of it. So flags it is, that trip to the store cemented it for me. On the white fabric I stamped out some different designs. Then I cut out the fabric into diamond patterns, folded it over a clothesline, pined the bias tape ov
er it and straight stitched it all the way down. Yeah, I need more photos.
Here's the end result:
So super cute and is going to be so adorable in little miss sugarsnap cupcake's bedroom!
I'll pull together a better post about this later, just wanted to get something out while it was still fresh.
