A few months ago, much to our surprise and delight, we found out our niece was expecting her first child. A baby girl!!! Naturally everyone was very excited and we began planning the baby shower!
I’m going to be in charge of the party favors and decorations. So with a pink theme in mind, I started gathering ideas and ordering everything pink I could find! I’ll share more about the decorations later. In the meantime, I made these cute little party favors to give away to each guest. They are so simple and pretty adorable if I do say so myself!
We are sending out around 25 invitations so that was my starting point. I bought 25 new small jars of baby food at the grocery store. (if you know someone with a baby, you can ask them to save the jars for you.) If you are a mom who is currently feeding their baby some baby-food, then save your jars because there a ton of neat projects that you can do with them later (this being one of them).
I bought the least expensive ones since I was not going to use the food. (I recommend buying the lighter colored food like apple sauce since the inside of the lid can be stained with the darker foods.) If you do not want to use baby-food jars, there are several other options available on Amazon. They also have good deals on baby-food though, so either way, you should be able to find what you need.
I rinsed the food out of each jar and then soaked the jars and lids in hot, soapy water to remove the labels. I used a flat razor and some Goof Off Heavy Duty Remover to get the stickiness off of the stubborn labels. Then, I ran them through the dishwasher to get them extra clean.
Afterwards, I spray painted the lids with white Rustoleum spray paint and allowed them to dry.
Since we know it’s a baby girl I ordered a bag of these cute plastic babies with pink pajamas on Amazon. I found them under baby shower decorations and favors. You can buy a bag of 60 babies for just under $9.00. You can also buy them in blue if someone is expecting a boy. I used my favorite E6000 Glue and glued a baby on top of each lid. (They also sell bags of all blue babies so you could do some of each if you don’t know the sex of the baby.)
I ordered the M&M’s directly from their website at http://www.mymms.com. You can custom order them with the name. However, since we don’t know the name yet, and they were a LOT more expensive, I went with the generic pastel pink, dark pink and white combination. Pricey candy… but they are super cute though. You can find some 2lb bags of M&M’s on Amazon as well for more like $28-$30 (pink, dark pink, white, variety, blue, dark blue). Little teddy bears and hearts are the decorations on the candies. I also includes “It’s a Girl”, etc. (An alternative would be to use the pastel M&M’s that are available around Easter.)
The pink ones below were $34.99 for a two pound bag, and I actually needed two bags. They have a five pound bag for $84.99 but I didn’t need that much. It is pretty expensive for candy M&M’s but since the rest of the project was inexpensive I felt like it was worth the splurge. Plus, it’s the first girl!!!
I filled each of the jars with the M&M candies and replaced the lids. I tied a dainty pink lace ribbon (about 14 inches long) around the neck of each jar (here is a nice blue version for boys). I LOVE how they turned out! These will make sweet table decorations at the shower. Furthermore, each guest can take home a sweet and yummy party favor! The new momma can keep a few in the nursery and store diaper pins or nail clippers inside. And because I have some leftover babies, I think I’ll put them on top of some cupcakes for the party!
