"Personal" Shower

My awesome sister-in-law Käte (it's German, pronounced Kate-uh) is getting married in a few weeks, so this weekend I threw her a personal/lingerie shower (along with my cousin-in-law Ashley and our friend Kelsey--Kelsey will be my other sister-in-law someday soon!). It was simple but very fun!

Marriage is such a cool thing, and it was exciting to be able to celebrate Käte's upcoming marriage...and to help her out with some 'exciting' things for the honeymoon.

We used some typical Party City decorations for the plates, cups, banner and 'poufs'.

It's hard to see, but the banner was personalizable, and this was a lingerie shower. So naturally we made it say, "Let the good times roll!" We are awesome. Although we almost forgot the 's' on 'times'...Let the good time roll would have been kind of sad. "Here you go, girl, here's all this lingerie but choose wisely cuz you only get one good time!" = not awesome. But we fixed it so we're good!

Anyway.

For the table decor, we used a pink and orange ombre picnic set that my best friend gave me last year for my wedding--thanks, Jessica!

Food included pasta salad, chips with salsa and guacamole, chocolate-covered strawberries (which I looove to make-if you ever need some, let me know!), apples and caramel and flavored 7-Up (courtesy of Ashley), and amazing strawberry pound cake cupcakes (courtesy of Kelsey). There was also diet Coke hiding in the fridge. We did the typical make-way-too-much-of-everything thing with the food, so there were plenty of leftovers. The punch dispenser and some of the platters were borrowed from my mother-in-law, which was great because it really helped the table display look really pretty.

A great thing to do at a shower like this is to get the bride some thank-yous and hand out the envelopes at the shower. People can put their names and addresses on the envelopes so that the bride has one less thing to worry about later! We did this-although I actually just used some "Mr. & Mrs." thank-yous that I had left over from my wedding last year. Win-win.

We also played some fun games! We started with a crossword of words that related to Käte and Lance's relationship-apparently there are crossword generators online that Kelsey found. How helpful! We also played "Relationship Status"--I found status updates from Käte and Lance's facebook statuses that weren't too obviously them and had everyone guess which page they were from. It was fun because Lance does some non-typical-male statuses. Even Käte got one wrong!

I handed out ribbon-wrapped pink nail polishes to the winners--they'll be perfect for the wedding, since Käte's using various pinks and a vintage theme. 

My favorite, though, was probably opening all the gifts and naming the lingerie. We put each of them in a bag with the name on a label on the outside and kept a list for Lance to choose from based just on the name. There were some creative ones- I'll post some of the names after her honeymoon!(So her husband-to-be doesn't see them first! Not that he's probably going to be super into my blog about recipes and crafts and showers but hey.) (No pics of the lingerie--trying to preserve a tiny bit of her privacy--use your imagination!)

There were a couple people who got her comfy items--a cotton robe and a nightgown that's cute and sexy but still perfect to *actually* sleep in. Great idea--I've been married a year and I'm always looking for stuff like that. Not that Ricky really notices, but I always feel a little weird starting off in lingerie and ending up in sweatpants. Not that there's anything wrong with sweatpants. Or even better--yoga pants, also known as 75% of my at-home clothing. Ahem.

After the gifts were opened and named, we tried our best to demolish the rest of the food while watching Bride Wars. (Side note--I freakin' love Bride Wars. Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway...awesome. If Emma Stone was in it, we'd have a trifecta.)

Some of the gang ^ enjoying the Kate/Anne antics. And food. This picture doesn't do justice to the amount of food we consumed.

Here's a picture of the planners with the lovely bride! Me, Ashley, Käte, and Kelsey. Love them!

What are your favorite games to play at showers? Best shower foods? Best wedding movies? Leave them in the comments!