Top 3 Easy Ways to Decorate Diaper Cakes

If you’ve been looking for that perfect gift to shower your friend and mother-to-be that combines care with cuteness, look no further than diaper cakes. While the word might conjure up the idea of some cake decorated with edible dirty diapers to remind her of what her future early morning madness, a diaper cake is not actually a cruel joke. It’s the term for piling together a bunch of mothers’ most needed supplies and presenting them in an attractive way.

Yes, any expecting mother would be delighted to receive diapers, baby powder, onesies, teething toys, and more, but these practical items usually come in unattractive packaging that can make for grim gift giving. With a little creativity, however, you can turn them into something beautiful that she can treasure until the day she dismantles it for actual use. At that point, she’ll treasure it even more! Even if you are new to the world of arts and crafts, here are some easy ways to bring diaper cakes of all styles together.

Stick to One Accent Color

When you’re just starting out, you want to make sure you’re making a structurally sound and visually appealing cake. That’s all! You can make this much easier on yourself by sticking to a color theme of white and one accent color. Think about it: the most common diaper color is white, so it’s going to be a big part of the design. If you decide that you want spring green and navy blue to be the color themes of your cake, you’re going to run into a lot of challenges. Instead, try pairing the navy blue with white from the diapers and many other packages to create an attractive and pretty cake color. If your best friend loves spring green then you can have a few green onesies tucked away inside, where they won’t mar the beauty of the simple whole.

Of course, once you’ve picked out the accent color it can be fun to do all of your shopping with it in mind. Color and price control are the best parts of creating a diaper cake, and there’s nothing that you have to buy; you can control the content and the price perfectly on your own. Starting out with a sampler pack of ribbons or fabric is a great way to get started, though, according to Baby Savers. It gives you something to compare to when you’re out gathering your supplies.

Get a Really Big Topper

If you’re not especially confident about your diaper cake making skills there’s nothing that a giant topper can’t fix. It can even help hide the flaws; a giant stuffed octopus on top, for example, could trail its legs down the sides of the cake to hide any structural issues. You also get extra points for not jumping in one the gender stereotypes bandwagon, or just getting the little baby ducks if they chose the let the sex be a surprise. One good tip is to tuck the decorations into the diapers as well; you obviously can’t glue or pin them because you don’t want to damage the integrity of the diapers themselves, but you can get a lot of sturdiness by sticking flower steps into the folders of the diapers, according to Our Best Bites.

Use Blankets to Shape the Cake

Lastly, diaper cakes don’t all need to be the same. There’s a classic three-tiered look that’s been made popular through companies like The Honest Company and baby shower blogs for years, but there are other shapes too. If you’re a little more adventurous you can make one shaped like a stroller without much fuss by using an item left out of many diaper cakes: blankets. Blankets are great gifts for new babies who need to be kept snuggly and warm, but there often isn’t room to include them in a classic diaper cake.

If you have the perfect little blanket for the new baby, you can use it to shape the hood of the stroller, according to Baby Center. Simply pin it to the bottom, stuff the loose end with even more diapers, and pull it up so that it creates a nice rounded shape. These kinds of diaper cakes are less popular because they seem more difficult, but they’re a great alternative to your standard styles. This way, if you happen to overhear that someone else is making a diaper cake as well you don’t have to wonder how you’re going to return four boxes of open diapers. You can just recreate your cake so that you both will have beautiful gifts to offer at the baby shower.