DIY Baby Shower “Welcome Sign”

I’ve been sharing some of the DIY projects I recently worked on for my BFF’s “tea party” baby shower. You’ve seen my tea party invitations and party favors and now I’m going to share with you good folks the welcome sign for the door I made!

I started out by heading over to Michael’s because what craft project isn’t better served by a trip to Michael’s? I found this great wooden cut out of a teapot for about $5 that was perfect for our tea party theme. Then I just had to figure out how to take it from dull to dazzle.

  Cue the fabric paper! This adhesive backed paper was a new discovery for me and I was so excited to have an excuse to try it out. Since the gender was unknown the green worked well and the polka dots are just so darn cute.  I scored it on sale for about $2 each.

   I was so excited to get started on this project. To attach the adhesive paper to the wooden teapot I peeled off the backing and laid the teapot face down onto the sticky side. I considered just tracing the shape onto the back of the paper with the peel still on then cutting it out but soon realized it would be extremely difficult to center everything perfectly onto the teapot and not have any wood showing.

  Once I had the teapot face down on the paper I stacked some heavy books on top to give the glue a chance to really grab hold of the wood and not peel away. I left it like this for about an hour. (And yes, I do have a mild Audrey Hepburn addiction)

After about an hour, I put the paper and teapot on a cutting board face down and used my little Martha cutting tool to cut carefully around the shape of the teapot. Once your are finished it should look like the picture above when you flip it over.

Because it is fabric paper there was a lot of little frays and runaway threads but these are easily taken care of with some sharp scissors. Just carefully follow along the perimeter of the shape cutting off any little imperfections.

 

For the next step I started to lay out my plans to decorate the sign. I measured exactly how much space I would need in the center of the teapot for my welcome message then hot glued some paper flowers (another Michael’s find) and a ribbon tied into a bow, to pretty up the front.

I hung up the teapot to let the glue dry and everything settle while I worked on the next step.

I decided on a bunting style banner to run across the teapot. I used my Martha letter stamps to spell out the words “BABY SHOWER” in a pretty purple color to match the bow then I carefully measured each letter into a triangle as well as the backing frame for the letters which is slightly bigger.

 

A simple glue stick did the work for me to attach each letter to it’s frame and then I was ready to attach it to my teapot.

Before attaching each letter I ran a piece of the purple ribbon across the top and bottom to act as the line the bunting hangs from. I then used more hot glue and attached each letter. Be sure to layout exactly where each letter will be placed beforehand so you can space it properly.

My little wooden teapot was complete!

 

Even though I was pleased with the result I still felt like it needed a little something to stand out. So back to Michael’s I went! I found a cute wicker wreath for about $5 that fit the teapot perfectly (thankfully they had more teapots in the store so I could test it out since I didn’t have mine with me) and figured it would frame the teapot splendidly: I wrapped some purple ribbon around the wreath with extra at the top to hang it from and hot glued some white flowers to the sides, all which was done really inexpensively for about $2. I think the wicker wreath and flowers really helped to make the sign stand out for the guests arrival.

  

In total, the welcome sign rang in at around $20. It was one of the more labor intensive projects because of all the small details involved but totally worth it since it’s the first thing guest see when they arrive so it’s got to be purdy!

 

(All photos property of Reckless Bliss)