Baby Girl Shower

Confession: now that I have three boys and have been solely in the boy-camp for a lot of years now, I find myself completely and totally overwhelmed in the baby girl section of any store. I pretty much freeze and am unable to pick anything out for gifts. I am just so far out of my comfort zone. It's a little bit funny. In fact, the further away from having a baby I get, the more overwhelmed I am by the purchase of any baby stuff.
So, when I decided to co-host a baby shower for a friend who was having her first girl, I decided to make her gift from me be the diaper cake which served as the décor for the shower.
I had never made a diaper cake before, but decided to do some research and figure it out. It turned out to not be a big deal to construct. I had come up with how I wanted it to look, and went to work on it.
This cake required 118 diapers (two packs of 59 size 1 Babyganics diapers), a wood dowel cut into a couple of pieces the height of the cake for stability, a $2 charger plate from Michael's, a spool of ribbon, and 3 identical silk bouquets from a $5 bin at Michael's. The mother liked peonies, and the flowers I chose seemed like they could either pass as peonies or roses. I loved the color scheme - sort of peachy-pink, hot pink, and red.
To construct the cake:
1) Roll all diapers individually with a rubber band, tucking the colored band inside so that most of what is visible is just white diaper.

2) Then group the diapers in rounds, wrapping a rubber band around each ring. Create each of the three tiers this way.

(This is the bottom layer with the charger underneath.)
3) Stack them on top of the plate, individually.

4)Work the dowels down into the cake and cut them off so that they are flush with the top of the cake. The dowels keep the cake remarkably sturdy.

5) Wrap the ribbon around the center of each cake layer tightly, and hot glue the ribbons together, but if possible, do not hot glue to the diaper (it won't be usable which is not the end of the world, but not the goal).
6) Arrange the flowers around the cake and if necessary to anchor with glue, try to hot glue the flowers to the ribbon, instead of the diapers, again, so that the diapers remain functional.
And that's it! It looks great, makes a nice centerpiece, and gives the mom-to-be a boost on diapers! I'm totally going to make another one of these if I get the pleasure of hosting another shower one day.