Homemade Centerpieces for a Baby Shower
The diaper cake is a traditional baby shower centerpiece that is as useful to the mother-to-be as it is fun and decorative. A diaper cake is a "cake" made from a few dozen rolled-up diapers, tied together with ribbon and decorated with baby items such as pacifiers, booties, wash cloths, teething rings, wooden blocks and hanging stroller toys. Two or three tiers is standard, but you can make the cake as big you'd like, just by adding more diapers to each tier and then adding more tiers. Does this Spark an idea?
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Things You'll Need
- Cake plate
- 62 Newborn-size diapers
- 62 White paper strips (1 x 7 inches)
- Tape
- Double-sided tape
- Wide ribbon (8 yards)
- Baby bottle (optional)
- Baby items (optional)
Instructions
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Unfold a diaper and smooth it open with its inside face up. Roll the diaper up lengthwise, starting at the short end closest to you. Make sure the gathered edges in the center of the diaper stay tucked inside. Roll it tightly and uniformly from start to finish so it won't unravel once it's in the cake.
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Wrap a strip of paper around the center of the diaper and secure the end with tape.
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3
Repeat the process on the remaining diapers.
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4
Wrap a piece of double-sided tape around the strip of paper on the diaper that will stand in the center of the bottom tier. Stand it upright on the cake plate and create a ring of diapers, each in the same vertical position around it, by pressing them lightly into the tape. You can create each ring without using adhesive between the diapers, but it makes it easier to manipulate the diapers into place.
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5
Wrap a length of double-sided tape around the middle of the ring of diapers and press more rolled diapers along the tape to create a second ring. Repeat the process until you have one center diaper surrounded by four rings of diapers, using 36 diapers total.
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6
Repeat the process to make the second tier, this time starting with a diaper in the center and creating three rings around it, using 18 diapers total.
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7
Repeat the process one more time, using either a tall baby bottle in the center, or a diaper. Use only one ring of diapers around the center, no more than 8 diapers.
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Put the first tier on the cake plate. Place the second tier so that it's centered over the first, and the third centered on top of the second. There's no need to use tape to hold the layers together.
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Wrap a length of ribbon around each tier and tie it off into a bow. Make each bow proportional to the tier it's decorating.
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Decorate the cake with baby items, if desired. For example, set pacifiers and baby booties along the edge of the second tier and decorate the cake plate with wooden blocks and stuffed animals. Remove any packaging and cut off all tags so the cake looks less like merchandise and more like a decorative centerpiece.
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Tips & Warnings
If you roll the diapers starting from the back side, the design on the front will show. If you roll them beginning at the front end, the rolled diapers will be white. Alternating the way you roll them will give you a mix of both, but an all-white diaper cake provides a clean backdrop if you have several baby items decorations.
References
- Photo Credit babywindeln image by Daniel Fuhr from Fotolia.com
