Manic Mama Miles: What Will It Bee? A Gender Reveal Party

One of my dear friends from law school & her husband moved to Boston & we don't get to nearly see them as much. This meant that every time they came to town, it was usually a celebration. When we found out that they were expecting their first little one, we knew we had to celebrate whenever they could make it to town. Luckily, their next trip was planned for the day after they found out the sex of the baby. I troll Pinterest & had seen so many cute ideas for gender reveal parties. And the "What Will It Bee?" party was born.

Now there are a lot of cute ideas for bee parties. At that point in time, there were not a lot of cute decorations out there. I couldn't find any invitations that I was in love with. Luckily, I went to Etsy & found lots of cute printable party packages. I found one from Dew Drop Digitals that featured yellow & black bee damask invitations & printables. You can find the Dew Drop Digitals Esty Shop here. The set was $20 & came with downloadable files for invitations, thank you cards, 2 different cupcake wrappers, water bottle labels, favor tags & address labels. I didn't wind up using the cupcake wrappers or water bottle labels, but still have them in case I want to use them for another party. I pretty much reuse anything that I can. I also used the address labels for namecards for the food instead of using them as actual address labels. I also used the favor tags as decorations, since I tied the thank you cards to the favors. This is how the invitation turned out. Warning: You will see throughout the posts about this party that I can be incredibly corny & will carry out a theme to the point of psychosis. Get ready. : )

No, the white lines aren't a weird design, I just whited out the address. With my job, you can never be too careful. ; ) So, hardest thing ever to find? Gender neutral yellow onesies (without ducks) & black & white onesies for the onesie banner. I couldn't believe how difficult it was, but after multiple stores, I was able to find enough to cover the doorway. My favorite was definitely the little one with a guitar. It was not bee themed obviously, but since it was black & adorable, it went on the banner.

Another thing that was hard to find was scrapbook paper. I checked Michaels, other craft stores & even the happiest place on earth, Hobby Lobby. I couldn't find anything that would work. So I headed back to Etsy & discovered that you can buy digital scrapbook paper. Mind blown. I was pretty excited. Dew Drop Digitals also had a yellow & black scrapbook paper download with 8 different designs. I love making banners & this digital scrapbook paper was perfect. I decided that since we were doing the bee theme, that the banner should be honeycomb shaped. Since there was so much going on with this party, we did it indoors throughout downstairs, rather than just in the tent that we do some of our parties in. So I went with a couple of different banners.

The first banner was right when you walked in & said "Welcome BaBee White". I threw a couple of paper fans up there & these little wooden bees. I loved these little wooden bees by the way. I found them at the Dollar Tree. They were all just unpainted wooden bees for $1. I bought them & just used my paint pens to color them. If you don't have paint pens, they are amazing & I highly recommend them. They make painting small things so easy. I use Elmer's Painters because they are a little cheaper than the Sharpie's. I have had them for probably 4 years & most of them are still going strong. They are pretty resilient. Anyway, back to the banners (can you tell I am a little ADD & OCD??)

I started by tracing out all of my letters using my stencil letters. I have no idea what "font" these stencils are, but they were on clearance one day at Michaels & so I bought them. I have used them for years. I have a bigger set that are more Times New Roman, but I tend to like these. They are kind of sassy. So I started with my letters alternating yellow & black. Then I figured out how big of a honeycomb I wanted around the letters & used my scrapbook paper to make the honeycomb & glue the letter on. Then I made a larger honeycomb in the same color as my letter & glued it all together. I love using alternating patterns with scrapbook paper & also love using alternating ribbons to tie the letters together. For the ribbon on these banners, I used black & white striped, yellow & white striped, white with black polka dots, black with white polka dots & yellow with white polka dots. I used two ribbons for each letter I tied together & just alternated which two I used. The second banner said "What Will It Bee?" & was done pretty much exactly the same way.