My dear friend Alli is having a baby, so a few of us threw her an ABC baby shower. It was, of course, based on a theme I saw in Martha Stewart, whose empire has made it such that creative types need never again have an original idea.

If you have a shower to plan, here’s how it went:

I hung glittered letters over the dining room table. These are from the sign I got at the flea market a while back. If I were buying them especially for the party, I would have just gotten a bunch of As, Bs, and Cs.

We used blocks and vintage ABC books to decorate. These blocks are Hank’s and the book is a damaged version from a thrift store. I use it to “monogram” gifts and cards and such.

The door sign was a vintage baby sweater on a hanger. This would have been even cuter if I’d been able to track down a vintage baby hanger, but no luck, so I just bent a wire hanger in at the sides.

This is a detail of the sweater sign. Bryan hot glued the wooden blocks together with a piece of string glued between them. (Bryan hot glues things because it makes me hot and bothered. Note to entrepreneurial types: Hunks and Hot Glue site.) The string is looped over the neck of the hanger and hangs down through the sweater.

I used glass baby bottles as bud vases for the peonies. Cutesy genius, I tell you.

We had two relatively mellow games. This is one I saw and loved at another friend’s shower. It’s a handmade ABC book with blank pages. Guests drew in pictures for the letters to make an ABC book for the new baby. Putting it together was a little more complex than I expected (I’ll post a quick how-to soon), but you could easily buy a pretty book from a stationery store and draw the letters in by hand.

For the second game, we had everyone guess how many magnet letters were in the jar, and the winner got a little prize.

The embellishment on the prize package is from the old dictionary book pictured above, which I also used on the gift for the new baby:

I think it turned out pretty cute. And no one had to rub Vaseline on their nose, or sneak into the bathroom to dry heave after being made to sample a jar of pureed prunes. Bonus.