It's the Bridal Showdown...

Just kidding, it's not really a showdown.  However, it does have to do with wedding and bridal stuff :)  As has been referred to in past posts, Shelby is soon to be married.  Like, really soon.  You know what that means?  A lot of last minute crafts.  A lot of them.  So many.  But it's cool, because we're really getting to do new and exciting things!

Now, this past weekend was Shelby's (south) Bridal Shower, since there was a handful of us down here in Florida who couldn't make it to the original Bridal Shower with her family up north.  I was in charge of games and entertainment and Cindy, a family friend, hosted the shower at her house and supplied a wonderful, beautiful menu.  My problem was that because Shelby had already had one shower, I didn't want to repeat games she may have played already.  I had trouble finding nicely set-up games that were appropriate for the forum, so in the end I worked with a mix of game ideas I found online and some that I made up from board games or ideas I had heard about at some point.  This post is to outline the six games we played so the next maid-of-honor who needs to plan a shower doesn't have to risk the dangers of the unexplored internet.

Game 1: Steal the Veil!
Start this game at the very beginning of the shower.  Everybody gets a metal ring, similar to binder ring clips, with five strips of tulle.  If you've seen those DIY tutu posts on pinterest, you'll know how to do this.  If not, it's super simple: fold the strip in half and put one end through the metal ring.  Fold the loose ends through the loop the folded side of tulle forms, and tug it tight.

Everyone can attach this to their sleeve or necklace or pant loop - whatever is the most convenient.  Choose 3 "Forbidden" words.  Each time during the shower that someone uses one of those words, the person who catches them saying it gets one of their "veils."  At the end of the shower, whoever has the most wins!  (Our forbidden words were "Cruise," "Josh," and "Wedding."  Shelby totally lost.  Josh's mom won.)

Game 2: Bridal Bingo!
This one is pretty self explanatory.  Make a 5X5 board.  Each square in the grid gets a word related to the wedding or couple.  Make sure each party attendee has a board that is DIFFERENT from the others, so the words should all be in another square.  I'll add the 6 boards that I made below.  Print out one extra board to cut up and stick in a bag to use as the calling cards.  You'll see that there is a ring around the "I Do" square on these boards.  We used those as the freebies.

I printed these on nicer photo paper to make them a little fancier, and I cut out squares of three different shades of pink scrapbook paper the size of each grid piece to cover the words that were called.  This ended up being a hit, and we played it more than once.

Game 3: Wedding Scategories!
I chose 9 wedding/love related categories and typed them up on a pretty graph in Microsoft Word.  At the shower, we had Shelby pick a random letter (she chose "J") and we all had one minute to try to fill in the 9 categories with something starting with that letter.  Afterword, we all compared answers, and in the end the person who had more different answers than everyone else won.

Game 4: Bride or Groom?
For this one, I went on Facebook and copied/pasted random status messages from Shelby and Josh going as far back as I possibly could to make it really hard.  I kept one sheet of paper that said who said what, my cheat-sheet to grade everyone else's answers, and then took out anything that specified gender or name from the status messages.  I arranged them in a chart with two check boxes beside each status message so the attendees could mark who they thought posted it.  Below is an example of the sheet I used.

I added a couple extra status messages on my cheat sheet in case there needed to be a tie-breaker, but Shelby won (only by 1 point) so it wasn't necessary :)

Game 5: Pass the Bouquet!
Think Hot Potato, but without the hot potato.  I bought a little bundle of flowers and wrapped them in a pretty silver tulle with some nice ribbon to make it look like a wedding bouquet.  We all sat in a circle and the tossing of the bouquet began - to anyone in the circle.  I played "Marry Me" by Train on my iPod and paused it randomly.  The person holding the bouquet was out, and the circle closed in until only one person was remaining.  Cindy was the winner with the bouquet!  I'll make sure to add pictures later, because it was quite fun :)

Game 6: Wedding Pictionary!

For this game, I made a list of wedding/couple related words.  I printed the list and cut it into strips, mixing it up in a plastic baggie.  We had some dry-erase markers and a white board set up at the front of the room.  Shelby started the game by pulling a slip of paper from the bag and drawing it on the board until we guessed what it was.  The person who guessed got to pull the next slip of paper and go up to draw, and so on so forth.  I'll add pictures of this later, too, but for now here's the list we used:

And that, my dear readers, is the sum of our Bridal Shower games!  I'll make another post soon with the DIY game prizes, because they were a HUGE success.  If you're planning a wedding, or planning a shower, I wish you the best of luck :)

-Bonnie