Diaper Cake with Tutorial

I mentioned in a previous post (at least I think I did) that one of my friends is having triplets. Her baby shower was this past weekend. With 3 newborn little girls on the way, I knew she would be going through diapers like no other, so I wanted to get her some diapers. I didn't want to just roll into the baby shower with a box of diapers though. I decided to make her a diaper cake. There are so many fun ideas out there on Pinterest. I considered several others before going back to the cake. This was my inspiration:

She is doing a jungle theme, so when I saw this one, I knew I wanted to make something similar!

Materials:

- Lots of diapers (I used 86 newborn diapers)

- Lots of rubber bands (1 per diaper, and several more)

- A paper towel roll or toilet paper rolls taped together

- A round, cardboard cake base (mine was 12")

- Ribbon

- Your choice of baby items

Directions: 

First, I started by rolling the diapers and wrapping them individually with rubber bands to keep them closed. 

(Please ignore my desperate need for a manicure.)

Using a rubber band to keep them in place, I placed diapers around the toilet paper rolls. Next, I put another rubber band around that row, and inserted more diapers to fill in another row. The bottom tier of the diaper cake has 4 rows of diapers. I repeated this process with 2 rows on the second tier and 1 row on the top tier. You could always keep going if you want a bigger cake, but I was out of diapers and the cake was slightly hanging over my cake base, so I called it quits. 

This is just 2 rows of the bottom tier.

The next thing I did is wrap ribbon around each tier to hide the rubber bands. For the top and bottom tiers, I just wrapped the ribbon around and secured it on the back side with double sided tape. For the middle tier, I tied the ribbon in a bow. Then, I started playing around with how I was going to place items around the cake. To keep them in place, I just used double sided adhesive dots, found at any craft store.

I had several items I needed to put on the cake. I had 6 teething toys, 6 washcloths, a set of 6 baby utensils (spoons and forks), Desitin and various bath items. I decided to make "lollipops" out of the washcloths and utensils. You can find the tutorial to those here.

The final product!

Back View

I was originally going to make the palm tree and have 3 monkeys hanging from it. With the size and weight of the monkeys, it would have had to have been a pretty big tree and pretty sturdy. I thought it would look funny, so I skipped that part. I attached the other 2 monkeys to her diaper bag and filled it with lots of wipes, full sized bath items and hooded towels. I wish I would have thought to take a picture of these, but I didn't. In hindsight, I should have done the palm tree and just attached all 3 monkeys to the diaper bag. Either way, I'm still pleased with the way the cake turned out. It's super cute.