When my best friend asked me to plan her baby shower for her, I was ecstatic…until I tried searching for a unique baby shower theme. I wanted to be creative and find a theme that combined a traditional baby shower with something my best friend would love. Because my friend’s a substitute teacher, spends most of her free time reading, and has an infinite love of all things Dr. Seuss, a literary-themed baby shower seemed like a natural choice, so BAM! The Bookworm Baby Shower theme was born.
How to Plan a Baby Shower: A Guide for Bookworms
Bookworm Baby Shower
It was so hard trying to narrow it down to one children’s author for our DIY baby shower theme that we opted to use a ton of different children’s books instead so that we could play with several ideas and colors. Most of the decorations we made ourselves, meaning this baby shower was budget-friendly. In preparation for decorations we couldn’t DIY, like Dr. Seuss stuffed animals, the bestie and I hit up thrift stores and garage sales, which I highly recommend doing.
As for actual DIY party decorations, we simply started by raiding our old bookshelves at our parents’ homes and chose some of our childhood favorites to set up all over the party venue. We chose to avoid just doing a basic sign-in sheet, so we had guests sign a copy of ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go’ by Dr. Seuss and leave a special message for the baby as a unique baby shower idea. On the invitations, we asked that guests bring a book instead of a card, so that the baby would already have a library ready from the get-go.
We ended up having five guests tables, so for each table, we chose one children’s book and created a table display surrounding that book. Here’s our Lorax-inspired table with homemade Truffula Trees:
The Lorax and His Precious Truffula Trees
The Truffula Trees were super easy to make. We simply used wooden skewers, glued pom poms on top, and ‘planted’ them in small clay pots. Be sure to check out Dr. Seuss-themed crafts for more DIY party decor ideas.
For each table, we used the book itself and added decorations surrounding that theme. For example, with ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’, we added a drawing pad, purple crayons, and the sailboat Harold draws.
Harold and the Purple Crayon Decorations
For a cool DIY hanging decoration, we were inspired to use ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle. We thought it would be fitting to hang our caterpillar over our food display, since the caterpillar eats through a whole week of food in the book. We simply hung paper lanterns, which you can buy dollar stores, using green for the body and red for the head. To make the eyes, just cut circles out of construction paper.
This fuzzy green dude would be so jealous of our delicious party food!
We kept our baby shower game ideas fairly traditional, although we did create a Guess This Children’s Character game. We selected famous children’s characters, like Madeline, Arthur, and Max from ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, printed out and numbered character pictures, and let guests see how many classic characters they could name. You would be surprised at how easily this baby shower game idea stumped our guests!
As a thank you to guests, I whipped up a puppy chow, adding Thin Mint pieces for flavor. Our puppy chow gift was named after Genevieve, the heroic puppy in ‘Madeline’, so we added a thank you note in French, to go along with the book’s setting.
This DIY thank you gift is the perfect way to say Merci Beaucoup to your guests!
And it was really that simple! Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed these easy DIY baby shower decorations. We also had several delicious book-themed DIY food ideas, like Lorax-Inspired Lemon Cupcakes and Goodnight Moon and Stars sandwiches. Maybe I’ll even add those in a future blog post.
If you enjoyed this post and have any unique baby shower ideas or questions about these projects, be sure to leave a comment below!
Bonus: More Bookish Baby Shower Ideas!
- Children’s Book DIY Wreath
- First Baby Journal
- “The Lorax” Truffula Forest
- Seussical the Dessert-sicle
- Story Scenes on Cookie Canvases
- Dr. Seuss Party Wreath
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Thanks for sharing this, love the very hungry caterpillar decoration!