Lapis Bridal Shower

Note:  I've been having trouble with uploading photos lately, so I apologize for the poorly lit pictures from my phone lately, this post included.

I previously mentioned that I co-host all baby and bridal showers at my church.  One bride at our church told me her wedding color is "lapis."  She described it as deep purple, but the fabric swatch she showed me looked like navy blue.  She said lapis falls right between deep purple and navy blue.

So I spent one whole evening walking around Hobby Lobby looking for anything in this mysterious color.  I found two things total.  Two.

Luckily, one item was sprinkles.

It's very difficult to capture the color of these sprinkles in a photo, but I really think they're exactly what this bride is going for.  Also, I strongly disagree with the label calling this color Lavender.

I used the sprinkles to make my homemade slice-and-bake cookies.

The second item I found in the correct color was a group of flowers in the wedding aisle.  They are made of a sheer material that's slightly more navy, and each flower has a pearl center that's slightly more purple.  Overall, they read as "lapis."

Then I had to think.  How could I use these little flowers?  My jobs for the shower include making the treats, making decorative toppers for the cupcakes, and coming up with the games.  I still needed cupcake toppers, so I decided to use the flowers for that.

I didn't want to spend money on these little flowers just to have people pull off the cupcake toppers and throw them away.  So, I came up with a way to add them to the toppers in a way that they would be reusable.  I also decided to only make 12 of the 24 cupcakes toppers with these flowers in order to save money.

Hobby Lobby didn't have any cardstock in the right color of navy/purple, but the bride's other color is gray, so I bought cardstock in two shades of gray.

I browsed the Silhouette shape store looking for something with leaves.  I chose a design called leaf abstract round lace.

I sized this round leafy shape slightly smaller than the circles I use for cupcake toppers.  I cut out the larger circles from lighter gray cardstock, and I cut out the leafy circles from a darker gray.

The most time consuming part was getting all the little pieces out of the dark gray shapes.

Overall, I thought the darker gray shapes just seemed like filigree rather than leaves, but I wasn't about to start over!

I used a glue stick to adhere all the dark gray shapes onto the lighter gray circles.  Then I moved on to address those flowers.

I purchased these pins at Hobby Lobby:

 

I trimmed the wire stem off each flower, leaving about 1/4 inch that I folded over.  I put a drop of hot glue over the wire.

I pressed a pin (tie tack) into the hot glue.

Then I pinned each flower onto a cupcake topper circle.  I hot glued the finished toppers to lollipop sticks.  I needed to orient the toppers with the flowers off center so the pins wouldn't collide with the lollipop sticks.

For the other 12 cupcake toppers, I used the same light gray cardstock as well as some white cardstock and one piece of patterned scrapbook paper that has love/wedding words and sayings in shades of gray and black.

I cut the largest circles out of white, the middle size circles out of gray, and the smaller circles out of the paper with the words.  I used a glue stick to adhere the circles together.

I hot glued these circles to lollipop sticks as well.

 

So here are the finished cupcake toppers together:

 

Here's how it looked all together at the actual bridal shower.  Pay no attention to the outdated mauve decorations in this old Sunday School room that we have to use. :)

Patty accidentally grabbed a round table cloth instead of rectangle.  Oh well.

The women at the shower took their little flower pins from their cupcake toppers.  One adorable woman was wearing a big floppy turquoise hat (she later told me she has to wear hats to protect her nose because she had skin cancer removed).  She begged for two more flowers so she could pin three together in a group on her hat.  She smiled proudly when she finished pinning them on and put her hat back on, and suddenly all my time spent cutting and gluing was totally worth it.

I think we made it through the biggest rush of baby and bridal showers at church for a while.  We still have at least one more this summer.

Now I have one day to turn my attention toward Nolan's 7th birthday party, which is tomorrow.  Jared arrived home from his two-week trek around the world late last night, and he can help me prep the house and yard today.  Nolan is super excited about his party, and that makes me super duper excited.

My next project is making and decorating 144 cupcakes for a graduation party next weekend.  Apparently, I don't really want any down time.

Jessica