Pumpkin Elegance

It's been a minute. Or a number of years. Life has kept me busy, for better or for worse and I haven't given any background insights on my diaper cakes in an extremely long time. No worries, I have pictures to let me know what comes next so here we go.

When the request came for the next custom diaper cake, it was once again, something new and different. I don't know how this kept happening, but it did and as always, I'm glad for the challenge. I love the opportunity to take someone's idea and create something beautiful with it. This go-round, the request was pastel pumpkin themed, but they wanted something elegant, rather than cutsie like so many diaper cakes have a tendency to be. They also wanted minimal, so that's what we went with.

This diaper cake was going to be something that incorporated floral decor rather than baby items. Several years prior, I had switched from creating a distinct front on the cakes and decorating all around. This time, I was going for an entirely new look with a cascade of decorations.

I given that this cake was created in October, I was able to find some Halloween and fall decor including light colored pumpkins and leaves. This was my first time working with floral decor so it was a bit of a task to pull the pieces apart and deciding which aspects I was going to use. Certainly, some of the colors were too dark so I had to pull out only the lighter colors.

This cake was a large one - 4 tiers. Since I wanted the decor to cascade, I needed to come up with a way to have ribbon around the cake without detracting from the decorations. When I build the cakes, I have some ribbon holding the middle of the tiers together. This ribbon is then covered by the larger decorative ribbon in normal diaper cakes, but for this one, I needed to still hide the structural ribbon while keeping the cake as clean as possible. I selected a slightly off-white floral ribbon to place around each tier. While visible, it sort of melts into the cake since it's dull, relatively speaking so when viewing the cake as a whole, it's barely noticed.

I then began adding the various leaves and pumpkins, tucking them into the tiers. I created two spirals that began at the top of the cake and angled downward to the bottom on opposite sides of the cake. This created a beautiful cascade with visual interest on all sides of the cake. For the topper, I used one of the larger artificial pumpkins I found.

This cake was so beautiful. It was the first time I created something with no additional baby items other than the diapers that made up the cake. It created an upscale elegant centerpiece for the baby shower while still being useful at it's core. 

What do you think? Do you prefer diaper cakes with more usable baby items or do you like the elegance and simplicity of this style?