When you are making your baby shower decorations, you can incorporate different types of decorations that are not usually thought of, like creating sashes or badges to honor the mommy-to-be and the grandma-to-be as well.
It's a sweet way to commemorate this awesome event and honor the people that are intimately involved in it as well. While you can certainly buy these sentimental touches online, what a beautiful thing it would be to make a personalized badge or sash which only the honorees would be the proud owners of.
Sashes are simply made from lengths of wide satin ribbon that have titles like “Pretty Mommy-to-be” or “Proud Grandma” written on it. Finish off the font with a glitter or metallic pen and secure with a pretty pin.
A great advantage of making your own badges is that you can truly make it part of the theme of the baby shower, so the chosen icons and the exact color scheme can be incorporated into the badge very easily. You'll get a lot of comments as to how unique your creations are.
You'll truly be able to make your imagination stretch here. Whether you download a certain design from the internet and tweak it to suit yourself or draw one all your own, it's both an entertaining and fulfilling project to undertake. It's very satisfying to be able to offer something that is both beautiful and handmade.
The easiest badges are made with shrinky dinks, a piece of plasticized paper which can pass through a computer printer, is colored in, and then shrunk in the oven. It's available in any craft store and is extremely easy to use.
You'd want to use permanent markers to color in the design. Forget washable markers as they can rub off, especially if they get wet. It can stain clothes and other things when that happens, which is definitely not what you want to have happen. If you don't like the dark stain of the permanent markers, try using colored pencils instead; if the plastic is still smooth, you'll need to lightly sand the side which you'll color so the pigment will stay embedded in the plastic.
When you're happy with the design and colors, bake your cutout badge in an oven heated up to 350F. Don't try this in a toaster oven, you're more likely to have it burn up and get holes eaten into it. It's impossible to control the heat on these ovens so you'll have a greater chance of having to throw away your work.
Put the badges on a piece of wax or parchment paper so they don't stick. After about a minute or less, you'll see that it's done right after the plastic flattens down again. Remove from the oven at this point.
If they're not completely flat, you'll need to press them down with a metal spatula or simply flip them over and let them bake a few seconds longer.
Using hot glue, attach coordinating ribbon loops to the back of
the badge, cover them with a circle cut out of felt, and glue on
a pin back. Attach onto happy mommy-to-be or grandma-to-be as a
finishing touch.