DIY Baby Shower Favors!

Here they are—my pride and joy.

After attending about 100 baby showers in the past five years (including four or five of my own), I finally hosted one!

My friend Jessica, who have I known practically since birth, is having a baby in March! Along with our moms, I helped host a shower to welcome her new little bundle of joy last weekend.

I got put in charge of decorations/games/favors. So for the past couple of months, I’ve had no end of fun researching ideas online (thank you, Pinterest!) and coming up with a decorating game plan. I’ll be posting another blog with all the decorations and how I made them.

For the favors, I knew early on that I wanted to use baby food jars. They are exactly the right size for a handful of candy, and conveniently, I have an eight-month-old baby at home who is more than happy to inhale the contents of those jars, so nothing is going to waste.

I made a trip to Michael’s to peruse the crafty baby stuff and got inspired for my favor.

Here’s how I made them, step by step:

Step 1: Buy some baby food. OR … get someone to save their jars (I needed a few extras, so I enlisted a fellow mom to save hers, too).

Mmmm ... carrots.

Step 2: Remove paper and clean jars and lids. I just ran them through the dishwasher.

Step 3: Choose a color and spray paint your lids. Jessica and her husband, Tony, have decided to be surprised on the sex of their baby, so I went with yellow. Interesting fact: I had to buy the spray paint in the suburbs of Chicago, not the city, where I live. Apparently the city of Chicago has banned the sale of spray paint due to the graffiti problem. From the looks of things in my neighborhood, there must be a lot of contraband spray paint floating around.

My dad helped me with this portion of the project. Spray paint is an acceptable man project, unlike tying little pink bows.

 Step 4: Glue a bauble of your choice to top of lid. I found these cute plastic pacifiers and secured them with a drop of good old Elmer’s glue.

The lids ended up having a kind of distressed look, which I loved!

Step 5: It’s time to make your labels. I found some cute baby clip art online, pasted it into a Word document with the words “Welcome Baby Sobie” over it and that was that. I printed a bunch out and then traced a circle around them. Find any old household object to make your circle. I used a mini flashlight. Next I used my Martha Stewart decorative punch to make a flower shape out of colored card stock. I used double-sided tape to put the circle with words on it and, voila!

There are some slight imperfections, but that's how everyone knows they are homemade!

Step 6: We’re in the home stretch! The last step is to fill the jars with whatever candy you want—I used pastel Jelly Bellies—and tie a ribbon around the top of the jar.

Ta da! Is this cute or what?

There are many variations you could do on this favor. You could definitely leave the label off if you want to save some time and the color options are endless. There are also a ton of different embellishments you could use on the lid—I saw duckies and tiny clothespins to name a couple. Get creative and have fun!