Bridal Shower in the Pink [Memory Lane]

I'm having a bridal shower at work on Monday, and I was thinking about the last bridal shower I went to, which was for my dear friend who is now my maid of honor! (This is the friend who came to the impromptu bridal shopping trip a while back). I was her maid of honor back in 2007.

Oh, how young we looked just three years ago!

Back then, I was single and lived in a little apartment with a cat and a teacher's salary (and maybe some maid-of-honor expenses?). But I still wanted to do right by my friend. So, here is the bridal shower I hosted for 8 people, for $100. I am very proud. :)

MOH's wedding color was pink, so we went with this for the theme. I had seen an old (2003) Martha Stewart Weddings magazine showing a beautiful pink bridal shower. Though ours wouldn't be nearly as swanky as that one, we thought it would be fun to keep the theme going if we could. We sent out a little pink invite via evite.com, asked guests to wear pink if they wanted, and even came up with some pink foods and drinks for the party.

One way I saved money was to cook nearly everything myself. Here's my kitchen, the morning of the shower:

I also ran to a party store to see what I could dig up. For about $30, I found a plain tablecloth on sale, some pink bridal paper plates and napkins (on sale, they were discontinued), some pink plastic flatware, and a cute little plastic pitcher. I know some consider balloons to be cheesy, but we needed them -- my apartment was hard to find, so I went out front and tied them to the car. I used the extras as decor.

For pink foods, we got some little pink candies, pink lemonade, and I made little salmon sandwiches:

We also had a delicious Whole Foods white and pink cake, but when we went to set it up, people gathered around and ate it so quickly that I never got any pictures of it. Still, the cake was so good that MOH and I have a tradition now of celebrating events with that same cake. We used her cake stand, which she reused a month later for her wedding (you can see it in the background of that shot up there).

A big hit was this game, Bridal Bingo. I saw it online and decided to make it myself. I made it in Microsoft Word and printed it on cardstock. For prizes, I bought a couple of little raspberry-chocolate bars -- the wrappers are pink!

And here are a bunch of pink ladies.

We do really love pink -- in addition to the other things we have in common, we met when we had a class together in graduate school, and both pulled out our pink phones at the same time. We decided to commemorate this. Can you name that show on TV in the background?

My cat wanted to wish her a happy wedding day, too.

Now that I'm planning my own wedding, I can't imagine planning someone's bridal shower at the same time... but I hear that some of you have to do it! Are any of you planning themed showers?