A few weeks ago I decided to host a Baby Shower for my friend Trisha from MomDot.  We have been friends for years, but I have never thrown a baby shower before – so I knew I was way out of my league.  Since Trisha was asking only for “diapers and wipes” I immediately decided to make a diaper cake.  I have to say, I was pretty impressed with the results.

I began with a trip to KMart and Hobby Lobby to pick up the supplies:

What you will need:

• diapers – any size, but the larger they are the more room you have for “stuff”
• tiny plastic hair ties – will hold the wrapped diapers
• larger rubber bands in assorted sizes
• large plate – or in my case, a pizza pan
• plastic bottle – will begin the base
• wide ribbon – to wrap around each layer and hide the little hair ties
• assorted baby goods and decorations

How to begin:

Start by rolling each diaper and securing with tiny hair ties.  For this large 3-tier diaper cake I used 92 (entire box) size 1, and 42 (half box) size nb diapers.  This was a great activity for my girls to help me with – The Tween doing the rolling and The Toddler handing her a hair tie to secure it with.

Since I knew I wanted a pretty large cake, I found the largest pizza pan I could find, and used three bottles to start the base.  I used a large rubberband to hold them in place.

Then begin putting the rolled diapers in the rubberband along with the bottles in a circular motion – where it looks like this:

Now, since this cake was huge, I continued to wrap rubber bands around the outside layer of the cake, and stuffing more diapers in, until it was nearly 2 feet in circumference.   For the second layer, do the same steps, wrapping the next layer of diapers around the tops of the bottles:

For the third layer I actually pulled one of the bottles up just enough to wrap a layer of diapers around it.  The finished product looked like this:

The ribbon that I found at Hobby Lobby was double sided… and what a difference some ribbon makes:

Then… the hard part (for me) kicks in.  DECORATING.  Just when I thought I was just as crafty as they come, I got hung up with where to PUT everything.  The part that should be easy put me in a bit of a tizzy, but thankfully with the help of my friend Jennifer (and probably 6 text images)  I was able to put it all together in a way that I was pleased.   In fact, I will tell you this – put EVERYTHING on it first, and then step back and rearrange.  When I just put two or three things on there, it looked crappy, and my blood pressure would rise.  But I just kept adding stuff and it came together nicely.

The Diaper Cake was a big hit at the shower, along with the other favors and games.   It was a fun activity for me to do with my girls as well.

Oh, and of course we had cake pops to match: