Our engagement shower

Since our engagement is going to be on the longer side (looking at a wedding at least 14 months away), we decided to have an engagement shower over Labor Day weekend.  My mom is coming up for the weekend and she'll get to meet more of B's family as well as the bridal party.  We wanted to get everyone together to celebrate in a low key event.

Food:

 We'll be having the shower at our house.  B's mom is helping with dip and my mom is helping with desserts.  We'll be visiting Costco for food, beer, and snacks.  

Decor:

We'll clean the house.  We'll stock up on black, white, and gold plates, napkins, and utensils.  Much of our serve wear is already white (matches everything) or polka dotted, so there isn't much to buy.

I do like the look of this:

But I'm not going to spend thirty bucks on it when I could recreate it for less than half the cost. Good thing I like crafting!   I have two different visions in mind...stay tuned! 

This will be easy to recreate:

Plus if I use erasable chalk markers, I can change the vague "2015" (or in our case, 2016/2017) to the actual date.

 I do like the look of these LOVE candy dishes:

But the only ones I found online were $40 for the set and that seems a bit pricey.  If I can find them for half that price, it's a do!

As I previously shared, we'll also have guests sign our engagement vase. 

So the final product should look like this:

Invites:

I'm working on our invitations because I want this to be a classy event.  There is no facebook invite for this one people!

I did investigate the bridal aisle for invites, but I won't have access to a printer for a few more weeks and that doesn't give a lot of time to get out the invites to our guests.  Plus the bridal invites were all super feminine and well, I'm marrying a manly man.  So, I ventured to the regular party planning section of the craft store and found black, white, and gold ones.  They have both stripes and polka dots, so that makes me happy.

I spent most of yesterday working on them:

I'll be going to the post office later to get cute stamps and get them in the mail this week.

Entertainment
 
I also spent some time working on games.  I do want our friends and family to feel comfortable, but I don't want the gentlemen to sit around watching TV or playing beer pong in the garage.  So  to try and prevent this, I'm coming up with some activities for everyone.  As an added bonus, I'm hoping many of these games we can reuse at the reception.

Ring Toss

I'll be collecting wine bottles to create this:

I haven't figured out what to use for the rings because I don't want the bottles to break from impact.  I should be able to find a crate at a craft store for a few dollars.  

Bean bag toss
  
These will also be fairly easy to recreate:

I'm not in love with the design, so I'll probably paint something different.  I'll be borrowing bean bags from work (another perk of being at an elementary school with an amazing PE teacher) so that's one less thing to make.

B also wants to pick up a horse shoe game at Target for the backyard as well. 


Not everyone will want to be outside, so we'll have some indoor games as well.  

I like the classic marriage advice cards, so we'll be doing something like this:

I also want to do "advice for B" and  "advice for A" cards.  I'll have the guests put them in something like this:

I'll probably do these cards again at the bridal shower (like a year from now) so I can combine the cards from both events into a scrapbook.

 Another thing I liked from another wedding was mad-libs, so we thought it'd be fun to have people recreate the story of our proposal and our relationship with these:

(Even better? These gems are a {free download} and I can print them on card stock at work.)

I found these adorable cards on etsy, but I think I'd rather recreate them myself:

We could have everyone answer and then do this to share answers:

I imagine I can find lip & moustache straw or cupcake toppers to recreate this delightful moment.  I'm not in love with the idea of having everything be lips & mustaches at a wedding because I think it's beyond over done, but I'm okay with this small moment.  

(Update: I found them, I just have to assemble them.  Bring on the glue gun!)

We'll also be asking our bridal party during the shower, but that part is still a secret!


Any other must-haves for our engagement shower?!