Sara's Bridal Shower

My sister's bridal shower was a couple of weeks ago, the day after her Bachelorette, which I recently wrote about.  The inspiration for her shower were hearts, wine, and things Sara loves.  

We went with the colors of purple and green to represent wine since she is getting married at a winery and used wine bottles as part of our floral decorations.  Sara and her fiance, Adam, have always shared random pictures of hearts found in random locations.  It became their "thing" pretty early on in their relationship.  

For things she loves, my mom and I focused on her favorite foods to help focus our plan for food.  We served bite-size, appetizer portions of all different kinds of food.  Our menu included:

Spinach-Artichoke dip in puff pastry shells

Fruit with a mascarpone cinnamon dip

Mini tacos in puff pastry

Lasagna bites (her favorite food)

7 layer dip

Caesar Salad in pancetta cups

Drinks:

Sangria

Blueberry acai iced tea

Strawberry lemonade 

For dessert we had:

White-chocolate Raspberry cheesecake (we bought a cheesecake from Cheesecake Factory-we had to go easy some where)

Home-made caramel with apples

White Chocolate macadamia nut cookies

With so much stuff to plan in a short amount of time, I was lucky enough to have some very wonderful bridesmaids who helped out with some planning.  Our cousin Jacque made adorable invitations for me and took care of having them printed.  Our cousin Katie helped with planning some games for the shower, luckily her mom Teri had some pretty good ideas (and took care of setting them up and the prizes!)   It was amazing to not have to worry about what we were going to do, especially since the ideas I was coming up with were going to take a lot of time to make it work.

After everyone enjoyed the food, Teri helped get the games going.  I love her "teacher" bell she used.  The first game was a candy themed game where names of various candies were matched to wedding themed events/people/things.  For example, "the wedding night" was matched with a "Skor" candy bar.  

Every one took the game very seriously.  There were some very fun/amusing matches in this game.  

The second game was a take on a shower game where you have to write down everything you remember seeing.  The twist for this game, however, was in the instructions given by Teri to take notice of every thing you see, without specifically mentioning items on the tray.  Once Sara left with her tray of kitchen goodies, Teri then told everyone to write down everything they noticed about what Sara was wearing.  Once that was done, then we switched and had them write down what was on the tray.  

Here is our cousin Katie and her adorable son Talin.

Kalea hanging out on Jacque's lap with Jacque's daughter Aydan.

My mom made Sara a cake platter that will actually be used for the wedding cake.  So pretty!

Our family tradition of giving the bride-to-bo a quilt turned out amazing!  9 women on my mom's side of the family each cross-stitched a square and my Grandma put together the entire quilt.  Green and Blue are colors Sara and Adam both love, and are part of their wedding colors.  Notice the two hearts intertwined.  The cross-stitch squared were each a different kind of heart design as well.

The dessert table and the heart garland.  I forgot to take a picture of the food tables before the party started, so the dessert table is pretty empty at this point.

Here is the banner I made "From Miss to Mrs"

Sara's work friends.  I took a couple pics since I caught them eating their desserts in the first one.

Our wonderfully crazy cousin Colleen, she loved the caramel we made (it was sooo good!)

My dad's cousins with Kalea.  Teri is on the far right, the wonderful game planner!

Katie with Talin again and her sister Megan holding Kalea.

My mom enjoying some Kalea time as the shower was wrapping up.

Sara with both moms.  I am pretty cheesy and made my mom stand on the "miss" side and Adam's mom stand on the "mrs" side.

Overall, the shower was a great success and Sara was really happy with it all.  My mom and I did our best to make it a surprise for her, especially since she loves to be involved with planning things.  I tried my best to come up with things that she had not seen, and I think we managed to surprise her with a few things (thanks pinterest for lots of great recipes!).  It really was a fun shower and I am so glad we were able to make it special for her, because she really deserves the best.  

We are just under 3 weeks away from the wedding (wow!) and I need to get going on my Matron of Honor speech.  Wish me luck!