Vintage Cars and Drag Racing Themed Baby Shower and Party

Hey there race fans! I’m so excited to be sharing photos from my best friend’s baby shower earlier this month! Especially after sharing her maternity photos last week!

Because of their love of vintage and cars, their baby boy, Hudson’s, nursery will be vintage car themed. But because Amie grew up as a drag racer in the NHRA, we felt compelled to gear the shower toward Amie’s *racy* past. It was such a fun shower to plan and to maximize the theme down to the smallest detail!

The Invitation Suite

I struggled and fretted over this invitation… there’s a lot of pressure when you’re a graphic designer AND hosting the shower. Or is that just in my head? Anyway, it took me awhile to come up with the design of the paper goods. How do we combine vintage cars and racing in one theme without being cheesy? Somewhere along the path, I thought of representing each: the dad and his love of vintage cars, Amie’s dragster, and then a “baby car” for Hudson! We then paired the invite with a “ticket” that had the RSVP and other information, racing red envelopes, matching wraparound address labels and some black and gray striped washi tape. Oh and hot rod postage stamps! I think that’s my favorite detail!

The Day of the Shower

And now for the day of… when it rainned all the night before and all morning! But I hope you enjoy some photos from the day where the threat of rain didn’t keep us from celebrating with a race to the finish line!

Each table was set up with its own racetrack with the centerpiece being one of Amie and her family’s trophies and medals. Along with a mixture of soup cans that were reincarnated as oil cans.

One of my favorite parts was the red velvet cake (Amie’s fave!) that was designed around the invitation and baked by my friends at Twinfully Sweet. How darling is that?!

The race track centerpiece functioned as a board game with all the shower games moving the guests’ cars forward in their lanes. And then at the end, each table’s winner competed in a relay race for the final prize!

 

The favors were created based on a tutorial published by Disney for their Radiator Springs cones. We did have to modify the tutorial to make the cones big enough for our sweet treats… a few of the snacks Amie had been craving during the pregnancy! Unfortunately, we didn’t realize we need to modify until after all the paper was cut! ha!

It really was so fun to play up the racing theme, and thanks to Pinterest, we found so many  cute ways to do that!

But my favorite decoration was the balloon arch that we created the morning of, after seeing this tutorial on The House that Lars Built. It came out perfectly, just as I imagined and I was so excited for it to be a cute photo background while Amie opened her many presents for baby Hudson!

My beautifully glowing Amie, hope you enjoyed your shower just as much as I had planning the details!

So many gushing thanks to everyone that helped pull this day together. It was one big team effort… in other, on theme, words, Amie’s pit crew pulled out all the stops to make this day a big win!