Purple meets green. A bridal shower.

In case I haven’t mentioned it here a few (many) times, my sister is getting married in about two and a half weeks.  That’s crazy.  Let me take you back in time a few weeks to when things were a little less crazy — we headed up to Iowa for a bridal shower at our aunt’s house.

We’ve been driving the “Avenue of the Saints” since we moved to St. Louis in 1991.  Things have changed a lot since then!  One time I accidentally took us to Quincy on the way because they had “improved” the highways so much.  Well, they “improved” the roads I guess, but not the signage.

At any rate, my aunt hosted a bridal shower at her house.  In exchange for letting us use her house and to quiet some of my control-freak tendencies, they let me do a lot of the planning/making/arranging (or maybe I just took over.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell).  Here’s what we came up with:

We did a twist on the white wine sangria recipe I got from my friend Erin and loaded it up with purple and green things instead: green apples, limes, blueberries and raspberries.  So yummy.  We had light finger food like chicken salad (and chickpea salad) sandwiches, spinach brownies, stuffed mushrooms and a veggie tray.  Dessert was a “wacky cake” shaped into a very large cupcake mold and frosted semi-successfully by me.  The saving grace was probably the extra-large cake confetti/deco things.  It didn’t look very large but it managed to serve everyone at the shower with some left over.  (FYI – I found out that the “wacky cake” recipe came from the Depression when many people did not have eggs or dairy to bake with.  It also comes in pretty handy for us crazy vegans.)

My mom spray-painted some soup cans to match the shower theme and these made great decorations and also little take home gifts for all our family at the end of the day.  She also snagged the cool green chevron napkins on the interwebs.

So that’s a quick little blurb about our time in Iowa.  Here’s my sisters and me with our Grandma just before the shower started:

(Yes, I think there’s a strong family resemblance! I hope I get the sophisticated white hair like my Gram someday – like someday in sixty years but you know what I mean.)  We are the only “branch” of our family who live in Missouri — all our aunts, uncles and cousins are spread out from coast to coast.  By percentage however, the highest concentration of our family is in the Des Moines area and it was so nice to be able to get together with all of them (both sides of the family at once!) for a nice shower.  I think my sister really enjoyed it.

Fast forward into wedding crazy time and I am now in the process of designing cute little things for the guest book, the programs (they’re going to be fans – perfect for an outdoor wedding) and the (hopefully) ace-in-the-hole ceremony backdrop modeled off of this:

(Looks cool right?  Image via this site.)

Wish me luck!