a shower for lauren & dave

my sister-in-law, lauren, is getting married in june. she is the older of my husband's 2 younger sisters. i've known her since she was 14 so the thought of her getting married is making me feel a little old! lauren really is like a little sister to me (especially since i have 4 brothers!) so i'm really trying my hardest to make whatever i'm involved in, really special.

her shower was quite an undertaking. there are 8 bridesmaids total but between us and my mother-in-law, we all did our share and pulled it off. of course, i did the invitations:

matching address label on the face of the envelope:

lauren and dave are having a june wedding, overlooking the beach. her color palette is very subtle - metallic dark gray and silver with a few light pink and hot pink accents. i thought the shower invitations were a great place to be a little less formal. i wanted them to be more fun. both their save the dates and wedding invitations featured a sand dollar so i kept that theme.

of course once i created the invitations, i had to make sure everything else matched.

instead of a guest book, we had cards for guests to leave advice for lauren and dave:

detail:

we also came up with trivia questions and i made those into a trivia game that was played while lauren and dave were opening gifts:

we collected all the trivia answers and i'm going to make them into a keepsake book.

for favors, we decided on starfish wine stoppers. we really wanted something the guests could actually use (as opposed to a cookie or candy or bubbles, although nothing against those ideas). they came already in boxes with white ribbon so we just had to add the favor tags. i punched holes in the tags and then cut slits next to the holes so they could be slipped onto the ribbon without having to untie and retie all those bows.

for my brides that are also friends, i usually do matching thank you notes as a gift. of course, since it was for my sister-in-law i did a little extra and also pre-addressed all of her thank you note envelopes (i credit that idea to my sister-in-law, julie, who addressed all my thank you note envelopes when i got married). since i made the invitations, i had the guest list anyway.

here are the matching thank you notes with return address labels (the sand dollar pattern continues on the back):










it really was a great day and i can't wait for the wedding!