Baby on Board! DIY Surf Baby Shower

Surf Baby Shower

Finally posting about my baby shower planning! Being a frugal?or cost effective person that enjoys entertaining guests such as myself, I've been researching and planning this baby shower for months. I've decided to post my own experience since I collected ideas from numerous sites and blogs. Just in case someone comes across it and gets inspired. Over the course of a month, I was looking at locations for the shower and realized location is one of the most expensive expenses. After emailing surrounding hotels, banquet rooms, restaurants for quotes. It made me realize I should spend that amount of money on food and gifts instead. I didn't want to spend 2 to 3 grands on a small location with mediocre food and have to resort to handing out teabags for party favors (no offense, teabags are a great idea but I just wanted to offer more). FYI, our family is of Korean heritage meaning it is possible we have to throw a 1 year party and to us, it made sense to save money on the shower in case we have to throw a 1 year party. Hence.. we have come to the decision of using our patio as the shower event location! Which was great in my opinion because there is no location fee or food & beverage minimums!!! My husband was worried about the amount of people coming  because even if we only counted close friends and family it was still well over 40. Therefore... we decided to throw the shower two days, Saturday and Sunday. We split the group based on who knows each other and who's more available on the dates.

Surf Baby Theme

Searching baby shower theme ideas, I noticed everything is pink, blue, green or animals. I wanted this to be personal and I have this weird thing about gender equality. When I searched for unique baby shower ideas (the internet is a fascinating thing), there were so many wonderful, unique, fun baby showers. I came across a surf baby shower theme and i fell in love instantly! When I first met my husband, he told me he enjoys surfing on his free time and went down to El Porto quite frequently. So we went ahead and decided for a surf themed baby shower with the colors coral and teal.

DIY Surf Baby Shower Prep and Cost

DIY Projects and Cost for the Baby Shower

The first thing I thought was surfboards!
Like I mentioned on the shower planning post, lot of the blogs said they got plywood to make the surfboards and I just didn't feel like going through all that. I bought poster boards from the craft store and cut out 2 surfboards from each poster board. Since I was going to stand them up on the food table, I just outlined the top shape. I used draft tape to make the patterns and spray paint. If I had more time, I would have painted some Hawaiian style flowers... but after cutting out the poster board with a exacto knife I got lazy.

I used spray paint from Michaels, Design master Colortool spray in Robin's Egg & Coral. I just used acrylic paint I had for the gray line. I also made little banner flags out of cardboard and hung it with twine over the surf boards.
I painted and cut out a sign to make Flora's Surf Shack with half the poster board. I just googled dolphines and looked for the easiest one to draw- not too realistic but able to tell it's a dolphin.

My friend Cassidy took home a poster board and made the Ovary chart for the game 'Pin the Sperm' . She cut out sperm from gray felt and we used double sided tape for it to stick.

Party Favors (Approximately 40 people) I really wanted something nice for the guests and loved the beach theme favors I saw. I decided to go for sunblock lip balm bags. Since the sunblock was just a mini size banana boat, I upgraded the lip balm option to Eos. For the men (only around 15) we put in a nicer trial size sunblock (banana boat cool mist) and a gag gift (condoms)... We were out of ideas.

So... I'll get to the cost break down here. I did it by store because I kept record of it by stores...