Believe it or not, even if you don't consider yourself a baker, there are several alternatives to expensive bakery cakes. Cupcakes are very easy, and sugar or plastic decorations in baby themes are fairly easy to find. You can also use frosting to "glue" small plastic baby decorations to tops of Little Debbie snack cakes. These are precious, and they look like you spent a lot of time. Another option is to skip traditional decorated cake, altogether, and go for individual cheesecakes (easy to make in muffin tins) or a delicious chocolate cake (make sure that mom-to-be isn't avoiding chocolate first). Cookies can make a great sweet treat also, and there are some really cute cookie cutters readily available. Finally, if you think you can make and frost a rectangular cake but are concerned about trying to do fancy decorations, you can find edible cake art images online. These are easy to apply to top of cake, and they are same images used by bakeries.

Many of games and activities for a baby shower are free. There are printouts available online if you want to play games like bingo. While party favors are a nice touch for a shower, they certainly are not necessary. A personal thank you, in person or written, is all that is necessary to thank guests for attending.

Throwing a baby shower is a wonderfully generous thing to do. It does not, however, have to break bank. Remember, most important thing when hosting a shower is to create wonderful memories for your friend. Years from now she will remember laughter and thoughtfulness of her friends more than she will remember fancy favors or expensive cakes.

Certain works said by him to belong to his oeuvre--they are listed in opening verses to Cligés--have not survived; these include, especially, a romance entitled Du roi Marc et d'Iseut la Blonde. One of Ovidian poems given in Cligés list appears as part of an early 14th-century compilation called Ovide moralisé.

Of above-mentioned titles two were left incomplete by Chrétien: Charrette was brought to a close by Godefroi de Leigni, under Chrétien's supervision (according to Godefroi); Graal was (almost certainly) interrupted by poet's death.

Not only did each of our poet's works undergo copying throughout 13th century (all eight manuscripts of Charrette were produced in that century), they were each subject to myriad reworkings, in verse and, especially, in prose. Perceval underwent a number of "continuations" and inspired many textual "spin-offs" before Grail story it told came to be incorporated into vast Prose Lancelot (along with Charrette, which constitutes midpoint text of this great compilation). Post-World War II scholarship has demonstrated that Chrétien's oeuvre was fully integrated into system of textual references and allusions underlying many important 13th-century texts--a series of "epigonal romances" (e.g., Fergus, Le Bel Inconnu) and a work like Roman de la Rose (Guillaume de Lorris's Narcissus episode, as M.A. Freeman has shown, "re-reads/re-writes" Ovid through a process of refraction involving Chrétien's Blood Drops on Snow scene in Perceval [Freeman 1976-77]). A romance composed as late as Froissart's 14th-century Méliador "revives" Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian manner and matter, as P.F. Dembowski has demonstrated (1983).

Chrétien himself utilized a similar network of textual allusion in his own romances. Scholars interested in sources have for generations pointed to such "first-generation" romances as romans antiques (Énéas, Troie, and Thèbes) and Wace's Brut and Rou, not to mention Tristan corpus (especially Thomas), as constituting a kind of quarry from which Chrétien extracted materials which he utilized in his own constructions. Chrétien's bookish learning--he was clearly a clerc fully trained in arts curriculum of his day--is evident in his love of such figures of ornamentation as adnominatio, rich rhyme, and chiasmus, and, as well, in particularly fertile manner in which he refracted Arthurian materials he borrowed from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace through lens of such works of late Antiquity as Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae (in Érec et Énide) or writings of Macrobius. As he states in Prologue to Érec et Énide, he--and he proudly names himself--and his work must be distinguished from fragmented and vulgar tales hawked before kings and counts by uneducated minstrels.” (6)