The Diaper Cake

The Original Diaper Cake - A Pinterest Adventure

So my cousin and his wife are expecting a baby girl in late April. As Mom and I were planning for the shower we agreed to split a gift 60/40 with Mom taking the lion's share of the expense and me taking the responsibility of the leg work. It's an agreement we use often, and it works well for us.

As I was looking over the baby registries and thinking back to my own shower I was feeling uninspired about a gift. Everyone wants to give a gift that won't get returned, isn't a duplicate (and therefore TOTALLY anticlimactic at the shower) and that the new parents will actually use. But even with Baby still so young it's hard to pinpoint the things that I would deem 'essential' and separate them from the 'do I even ever use that' items.

So I went for two easy-peasy items off of the registry, picked them up on a quick shopping trip, got myself some clearance baby wrapping paper and was prepared to call it done. Then I found inspiration: a raffle at a maternity store to win a diaper cake. A diaper cake? What on earth is that? Oh yeah, it's an awesome idea! That's what it is. It's a giant pile of diapers and baby things made to look like a wedding style layer cake. Awesome!

I immediately determined this was what I had been wanting to do all along. A gift that combines practicality with design, and is as much a gift of time and thought as it is money. Definitely more my style than a plain old gift from a registry. And as I thought more about it, some of the best things I have for Baby were gifts that were made. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for the magical puts-baby-to-sleep-everytime swing that someone 'just bought' off the registry. But I can't afford that. So to me, a gift where I can spend time (which I do have) instead of money (which is harder to come by) is a good solution.

So off I went to get my supplies (and return my boring registry gift):

• 1 pack of 4 burp cloths
• 1 pack of 4 receiving blankets
• 2 packs of 6 little girl hair clips (so cute!)
• 1 pair of tiny little newborn slippers with adorable purple flowers (the same ones fell in my cart for Baby on a previous shopping trip - they were blue with dinosaurs)
• 1 pack of 36 newborn size diapers
• 1 pack of 40 size 1 diapers
• two rolls of 1.5" ribbon (really I only needed one roll, but I wanted to have two different colors)
• rubber bands

Then I scrounged up a few odds and ends from around the house:

• a cardboard box
• a wrapping paper tube (I always have some of these lying around because my husband, yes my husband, once chastised me for getting rid of such prime sword fighting utensils...)
• my hot glue gun
• curling ribbon
• baby wrapping paper
• scissors and an ink pen 
• a cellophane gift bag (the big kind for gift baskets etc)

**I intend to make another of these soon for a friend and post the How-To instructions then. So definitely check out that post to come. For now, I'll just show you the finished product.

The tutorial for this project is here. Go check it out!

A little time and a little magic later...TADA! An AWESOME (at least in my opinion) diaper cake!!

EEEEE! I love babies!

:)