DIY Diaper Cake

DIY Diaper Cake!

How to make the BEST baby shower gift

If you invite me to your baby shower, you're getting a diaper cake. They look good, you need diapers(trust me) and any other stuff I can jam in there. Also, it fulfills my need to make stuff and be crafty. Here's a tutorial showing how I make my diaper cakes. Now before you try to say "I can't do that, I'm not crafty" and make me want to hit something, just look at the directions. You CAN do this!

So first thing I do is take a look at the gift registry. I might not be getting anything off of there, but I can see if you have preferences for a certain diaper brand. You might also be requesting small items I can incorporate into the cake and maybe catch the theme you're going with. 

Time to go shopping. I prefer Pampers Swaddlers, size 1 or 2(the package I used for this cake had 108, size 1 diapers). This is for a couple reasons...These diapers are all white, newborn diapers are very tiny to work with and the babies sometimes grow out of them pretty fast so you might not need a whole cake of newborn size, and it's nice to have a variety of sizes ready to go when that little one grows overnight. In addition to the diapers, I usually get a package of wipes or lotion and baby wash to put into the center of the cake. These help weigh it down a little and also help keep the layers together. These Johnson's Take Along packs are also a great way to add goodies to your cake. Use ribbon, raffia, stuffed animals, wooden painted embellishments from the craft store, or flowers to decorate. You also need something to put the cake on. The dollar store has pizza pans that work well or you can cut a circle out of foam core board. I also get a shrink wrap gift bag from the dollar store to put it in when I'm done.

Ok, time to start the cake. I've found the easiest way to form the circle is to use my set of different sized mixing bowls. I've also heard of people using different sizes of round cake pans. I take a few diapers at a time and space them about an inch apart in my hand, then place them around the inside of the bowl.

When that is done, just carefully flip the bowl over and use yarn around diapers to secure together. I usually have to make adjustments, so instead of a knot I tie a bow so I can easily undo if I need to. Do this with all layers of the cake, each layer a different size. For small layers you might not be able to flip out without them falling apart so just turn it over, lift up the bowl a little and tie string around before removing bowl.

Place the largest layer on the round base. Put the wipes or lotion/baby wash in center and using the leftover diapers I fill the gaps in the center. The next layer goes over the top half of the wipes and fill in gaps with more diapers. As you go, check and make sure the diapers are evenly spaced in each layer, you may have to add or remove diapers. For the top layer, fill in center with extra diapers and place on top. the plastic gift wrap will hold this in place but you can slide in wooden dowels if you want to make it extra secure.

After you have the layers arranged the way you want, it's time to decorate. This cake I made today was a Hawaiian theme, I wrapped ribbon around each layer to measure how much I needed. I secured the ribbon to itself with hot glue, making sure I didn't get any glue on the diapers.  Now I glued the fabric flowers to the ribbon. If I used the Johnson's items I would secure them to the ribbon with hot glue as well. The topper for my Hawaiian cake is a rolled up pink onsie and more flowers.

To finish the cake off, I place it inside the shrink wrap bag and secure the top. Since I don't want the top of this cake to be crushed when I shrink it, I pick up the cake by the top of the bag where I secured it closed. Use a hairdryer and start at the bottom of the cake working up, to shrink the plastic. I stopped before I got to the top layer so the plastic wouldn't crush my flowers. Now just add a ribbon to the top.

Thanks for visiting!

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