I’ve mentioned before that my sister Heather is also pregnant with her first babe (also a boy!). This past weekend, we threw her a baby shower at my parents’ house and we had a ball celebrating her impending arrival.

Some decor details:

For anyone who might be wondering, the yellow popcorn boxes were an Etsy find; they can be purchased here.

I’ve seen diaper cakes at a few baby showers that I have been to, and I love the fact that it’s a cute decoration that will be of use to the parents-to-be once the shower is over. There are tuturials all over the internet (just type “diaper cake” into the search bar on Pinterest and you’ll see dozens – nay, hundreds!) so I figured I would just briefly go over how I put mine together.

You’ll need:

• diapers (I used 104 Pampers Swaddlers, size 1)
• an empty paper towel/toilet paper roll
• thin ribbon or string (to hold each layer together)
• decorative ribbon
• straight pins or scotch tape (pins worked better for me)
• decorations (pacifiers, baby socks or mittens, small toys, stuffed animal, etc)

A lot of the tutorials out there recommend rolling the diapers individually and securing them with an elastic, but it seems to me that unrolling each diaper would be frustrating for a new parent who is trying to stop a changing table crisis on their first day home from the hospital, so I went a different route that was inspired by a diaper cake that I received as a gift at my own baby shower.

To start, I grabbed half of the diapers (52, to be exact) for the bottom layer of the cake. Working with as many as I could hold at once, I stacked them up so that they were all facing the same way and then turned them on their side (the long way) and fanned them out a little bit so that each diaper stuck out a little bit more than the one before it. I laid each group around an empty toilet paper roll (with the thinner ends of the diapers facing the roll) and once a rough circle was formed, I tied the ribbon tightly around the group.

It was way easier to adjust the diapers when they were grouped like this instead of trying to get them looking perfect and then tying them together with the ribbon.

Once the bottom layer was done, I grabbed about 2/3 of the remaining diapers (so about 34) and repeated the process, but this time without the toilet paper roll.

I liked how it looked having the direction of the diapers alternating from layer to layer, so once I was done with the middle layer, I just flipped it over and the pattern was reversed.

Then it was just a matter of using the remaining 18 diapers to make a tiny layer to go on top.

 I didn’t do anything special to hold the layers together; I just stacked them and they did just fine. Then I used some decorative ribbon that I picked up at a fabric store and wrapped it around each layer. Initially I secured it with tape, but the ribbons came loose. So at the suggestion of my clever mom I ended up using straight pins (and just made sure that the end of the pin was stuck into the cake to avoid any accidental pin sticks). The ribbon was nice and tight with the pins holding it on and it ended up being a cleaner look to boot.

From there I just used pacifiers, baby socks and mittens, and carseat toys and placed them around the layers (again, I didn’t do anything special to secure them to the cake; they were just tucked in around the layers) and a little stuffed animal for a topper. I tucked the legs of the stuffed animal into the center of the top layer and that helped to keep it secure.

Easy as pie cake!