Baby Clothing Bouquets and Diaper Cakes

14 Nov 2009 11 Comments

by cydlee61 in Crafting

Baby Clothing Bouquet

My nephew and his lovely wife just had their second baby in June.  Callie is, like her brother, an absolute delight.  I found some adorable ideas for crafts that I could make in celebration of her birth.  One of the things I made was a baby clothing bouquet.  It’s a really cute idea that I don’t honestly feel I executed as well as it could have been done, I think because perhaps some of the articles of clothing I used were a tad too big for this project.  It was much easier to roll and fold the smaller clothing items into something that really resembled a rosebud.  I so wish I had a photograph of my finished product to show you but for some reason I can’t seem to find the majority of the pictures I took this summer.

The bouquet as demonstrated on Martha Stewart

Materials needed:

1) Articles of baby clothing…the little “skull caps”, socks, booties (not too thick), bibs, t-shirts, and onesies work pretty well.  I also had some dresses and some two piece pajama sets that I used as well but like I said, it’s a bit more difficult to form the flowers out of the larger clothing items.  I will give you a bit of a hint for working with the larger items though when it comes to creating slightly different flowers out of them.

2) The original “recipe” that I had for this called for floral tape but I preferred to use rubber bands.  I found that if I had wanted to use the floral tape, I would have needed an extra set of hands to help me out.  That being said, it’s important to note that I do have one hand that doesn’t have the best coordination and mobility to because it was injured in a car accident so I can be a bit “all thumbs” at times when more intricate work.  You may find the floral tape works just fine for you!

3) The instructions I found for this project also called for wire.  They wired the buds together to form the bouquet but I didn’t find that gave enough stability to them.  I preferred to use either chopsticks or wooden skewers based on what I had on hand at home and based on the size/weight of the articles (using chopsticks for the larger, heavier pieces and skewers for the smaller, lighter ones).

4)  You might also want some artificial flowers or tissue paper to make some paper flowers out of as this can fill in any gaps in the bouquet and round it out.  I didn’t need that as I had PLENTY of clothing to fill the container.

5)  Some artificial leaves or ones that you cut yourself out of paper can also be a nice way to round out the bouquet and to add some additional colour and texture to it.  It just makes it look more like an actual bouquet of flowers!

6)  You either need some tissue paper and ribbon so that you can create a bouquet and use these to wrap it in (for presentation much like the bouquets that are given out for example at the end of a performance) OR you need some sort of pail/vase type item to put it in.  I put my bouquet into a small trashcan – a) I wanted something that would be useful even after the bouquet was gone and b) I found a cute little trashcan in appropriate colours with butterflies on it (butterflies are the theme of the baby’s nursery).  I crumpled some tissue paper up and put one of the larger baby blankets I had in the  bottom of it to keep the bouquet in place better (tissue paper alone would have worked just fine…I just needed a place for that blanket anyway).

Directions: Lay out each item one at a time or in the case of tiny items like the socks you may find that using both in a pair, laying them on top of each other, will fill out the bud better.  With some of the larger items like the hat, bib, or t-shirt, I found it was better to lay them out and then fold in parts of them to create a rectangle.  For example, in the case of the t-shirt, fold each of the sleeves in so that you have a large rectangle formed.  Then, you may also need to fold it in half or thirds to make a smaller rectangle that is more appropriately sized for the rose buds you are trying to make.

With each of the clothing pieces, you want to begin rolling from one end until you have basically rolled it into a sausage shape.  The instructions I had suggested tapering and spiralling it as you roll but my ability to do this varied according to the thickness of the material.  Sometimes trying to roll and taper it was really tricky if it was really thick so in those cases I simply rolled them up and didn’t really spiral them at all.  However, once I formed those buds, then I would use my fingers to pull some of the folds open slightly and “fluff” them out a bit.

With the really large items I had (which even included some of the smaller thinner receiving blankets), I found that trying to roll them into a bud was only making me want to tear out my hair!  So, instead, I decided to resort to the tissue paper flower making technique I learned to do as a child.  Remember those?  Fold in the necessary parts of piece of clothing to make a rectangle as before but then fold it back and forth in an accordion fold.  Once it’s all folded, you take the strip you have there, fold it in half and secure at the fold.  Use your fingers to pull each of the layers apart one by one and fluff out into more of an open rose shape (as opposed to the buds you were making before).

Need a reminder on how to make those tissue paper flowers?  Check this out!

Once you have created a bud or open flower, secure each at the bottom of the flower with a rubber band.  I then poked the stick I was using for each flower up into that part where it was secured and used the rubber band to hold it into place.

Crumple up tissue paper, use floral foam, or put baby blankets into the bottom of the container you are using and then arrange the flowers in it to make a pretty bouquet!

Here’s Martha’s take on the baby clothing bouquet:  http://www.marthastewart.com/article/baby-bunch-bouquet

And here is the demonstration of how to make it from the Martha Stewart show:

Disposable Diaper Cake

The cake I made!...no diapers were harmed in the making of this cake!

 

I had seen pictures of these online but didn’t actually have any instructions in front of me when I started making it.  I thought I could figure out how it was done without needing a tutorial.  I did okay but once I got going, it started getting a bit unwieldy and I found instructions online and adjusted what I was doing.  I used an entire package of Huggies diapers.  We tend to have large babies in my family so I chose not to use the Newborn size as those only go up to 10 pounds.  Instead I used the next size up which in the case of Huggies is called size 1 and they go up to 14 lbs.  There were 66 diapers in the package.

I began by opening up the diaper and started from one end, rolling it up (like a sausage like you did with the clothing bouquet as well) until you reach the other end.  I opened up another diaper, laid the rolled up one at one end of the diaper, and rolled the second diaper around the first (so that the first diaper is completely encased in the first one).  This is NOT the method I have found anywhere else!!! I continued in this manner, using paper clips (the plastic coated ones so they wouldn’t tear the diapers) to secure them together as I went.

Once this got to about the size of a dinner plate or slightly bigger, it became a bit unwieldy and I found that unless someone came along to be my second set of hands, I would not be able to finish it in this way.  That being said, I feel like my method made a much stronger, much more secure base for the cake and I am glad I did it that way. At this point, I found a piece of thick cardboard and covered it with foil to make a “plate” for the cake to sit on.

From this point on, I began to use the method that I found in the online tutorials.  In this method, you take one diaper, DON’T open it up…leave it folded as it comes out of the package.  Again, you roll the diaper up into the sausage shape.  I found it worked best to go from the open end to the folded end – it makes for a neater bundle.  Secure each of these little individual diaper bundles with a rubber band.  Take each of these individual diaper bundles and arrange them around the base that you already have.  I had found these large bags of rubber bands at the dollar store.  They had really small rubber bands that were clear in them and those were perfect for each of the individual diaper bundles.  They also had really large rubber bands in them, so I put one of the large rubber bands around the base I had made out of multiple diapers to secure it even better than just with the paperclips but also because then as I made an individual diaper bundle, I could just tuck it in right next to the base and hold it in place with the rubber band.  This eliminated the need for a helper as I worked on the cake.

For the second and third layers, I didn’t bother to create the base like I did for the bottom layer.  I didn’t feel they needed that extra stability.  For those, once you have several individual diapers rolled up, stand several of them on end, bunched together and once again, use a rubber band to secure.  You can just “wing it” and estimate how many diapers will look best on each layer but I divided them up so that I had twice as many diapers on the second layer as I did on the top and three times as many diapers on the bottom layer as on the top layer.   This worked out to be 33 diapers on the bottom, 22 on the middle, and 11 on the top layer.

Once you have each layer completed, use a pretty ribbon around each one to cover the rubber bands.  I think it looks better to have a fairly wide ribbon – mine was about 1 1/2 inches wide.  I held the ribbon in place by using a glue gun and just gluing where the ribbon ends overlapped, being careful not to get any glue on the diapers themselves (I wanted this to still be useful to the recipients).  Stack the layers up and I used chopsticks and/or wooden skewers that I carefully inserted from the top layer down through the cake into the bottom layer.  Again, I was careful to insert these so that they went down between the folds so that I didn’t tear apart the diapers.  These sticks will help to keep the the cake together.

Now to embellish the cake!!!  For the cake topper, I found an adorable, appropriately sized little teddy bear.  To hold it onto the cake, I used a rubber band to hold it onto a stick, again hiding the rubber band with a pretty ribbon tied around it.  Push the stick into the cake to hold it in place.  Additional embellishments can include other baby toys, pacifiers, artificial flowers or things like silk butterflies, baby spoons, small articles of clothing (especially if you form them into rosebuds as above for the clothing bouquet), pretty much any appropriately sized (and colour coordinated) baby items.  I saw one cake online where they had used a baby washcloth, bunched and gathered it up to make a bow (like a bow tie) and put that on the cake. I found an adorable pair of pink baby shoes that I used to add to my cake.

The shoes had little tabs on the back of them so I strung ribbon through them, tied the ribbons to sticks, and gently pushed the sticks down into the folds of the cake.  Voila!  A really cute diaper cake!  I used this simply as a gift to the new parents and baby but it makes a really adorable centerpiece for a baby shower too!

Some ideas for embellishment:

http://www.eksuccess.com/beinspired/project/chunky-monky-diaper-cake-147

Want to see it demonstrated?  Here is someone making a diaper cake!

Note:  since making this I have seen it done with towels as well – hand towels, washcloths, tea towels etc.  This would make a lovely gift for a bride-to-be or again as a bridal shower centerpiece.  At one site, they had even made themed towel cakes for pretty much all occasions:  Mothers’/Fathers’ Day, going off to college, birthdays, and so on.  With the holiday season coming up, I can picture a really cute Christmas themed cake, made of Christmas towels and decorated with candies and ornaments and so on.  What a lovely and different hostess gift that would make!