Bridal Shower Tips & Tricks

Hi everyone! Wow! What a crazy couple of months it has been! Taylre got married a few weeks ago and we have just been so busy planning and celebrating. But we are back with lots of fun content for you all! Since the wedding happened so recently, we have posts coming up in the next few weeks where we are going to share all things wedding! Starting this week, we are going to be talking about the bridal shower! We had Taylre’s bridal shower at the beginning of June and we have lots of tips on how to plan and make the shower an amazing day for the bride-to-be!

Invitations

Before you send out the invitation, it is important to sit down with the bride and those who are hosting the bridal shower to comprise the guest list. Typically the maid of honor, bridesmaids and close family members plan the shower which is what we did. The guest list can include anyone that the bride wants but it typically includes female family members and close friends. Once you have sat down with the bride and finalized the list, it is time to mail out the invitations. We mailed our invitations out at the end of April and the shower was at the beginning of June so that gave our guests right around a month to rsvp. We used Shutterfly to create our invitations and they came out really nice. They can be a little bit pricey but they have really good sales often so it is important to order them when they are on sale to keep the cost down. These are the invitations that we used!

Location

We had Taylre’s bridal shower at a Hilton Garden Inn near where we live and it was beautiful! The staff was all very nice and they catered all the food which was brunch-style and delicious! Having a bridal shower at a hotel or other event center is a great idea because it makes set-up and clean-up much easier. Although, having the shower at someone’s house is another great option that would be a little less pricey!

Decorations

The first thing to do before ordering any decorations is talk to the bride about the colors or theme that she has in mind for the shower. For Taylre’s we didn’t really have a theme but the colors were light pink, white, gold with some accents of greenery throughout, so all of the decorations were these colors. There are so many inexpensive, DIY decorations out there that are really easy to make a bridal shower look beautiful! We got most of our ideas off of Pinterest! For DIY decorations, I made these really cool photo rings with pictures of Taylre and Luke in them. I ordered the gold rings from Amazon and used ribbon and hot glue from JoAnn Fabrics! I think the whole project cost me maybe $20! Our dad also made a donut board for dessert that said “Donut Mind If I Do” that was a huge hit! We ordered donuts from Wegmans and everyone loved it, it turned out awesome! For decorations that were not DIY, I got mostly everything from Target and Kohl’s. All of the decorations from Kohl’s were 50% off which was awesome, we got a bride balloon sign, a “bride-to-be” sash and a couple of table decorations from there! All of the balloons I ordered were from Amazon and I was able to get really inexpensive wedding balloons in light pink, white and gold! We also had a “Welcome to Taylre’s Bridal Shower” sign that I ordered from Zazzle which looked beautiful! We were able to find and make some really beautiful decorations for Taylre’s bridal shower that were pretty inexpensive and looked awesome! Watch out for when the decorations go on sale if you’re looking for wedding decorations because almost everything we got was on sale and was a great money saver!

Games

Games are a really fun way to get your guests interacting during the shower and keep everyone entertained. The biggest tip we can give you when it comes to the games is to order them off of an online website (we used Etsy) and download them digitally and then print them yourself. This saved us a ton of money because instead of spending 50+ dollars per game to have a company print them for us, we spent a total of $12 to digitally download the games and then just bought card stock from a craft store and printed them ourselves. We were a little nervous to do this because we wanted to make sure that everything looked really nice but the games ended up turning out great! We played 5 games at Taylre’s shower and this was just enough to keep everyone entertained but also not too many where people were getting bored. For prizes for the winners of the games we got some simple but really nice gifts. For example, one of the prizes was a coffee mug with a gift card to a coffee shop, another one was a little beauty kit with lotion, body wash and other skin care products in it. Start shopping for prizes early so you can pick up stuff when it is on sale!

Favors

Before guests leave your bridal shower, they get to take home a favor as a little thank you gift for celebrating with the bride. We did a really simple DIY favor that was super cute and really easy to make. Basically, we put all of the ingredients for a s’more in cellophane bags and tied them with a ribbon. Then we put customized stickers on the front that said “Take Home S’more Love” with the date of the shower on them that we ordered from Zazzle. All of the bridesmaids got together and assembled them. They were so easy to make and they turned out so cute!

Outfits

Picking out and outfit for a bridal shower can be difficult so we have put together some links to some outfits that would be perfect to wear to a shower: