Curious George birthday invitations

Yikes, yikes, yikes...it's been far TOO long since my last post.  Being a single mom who works full-time apparently doesn't leave much room for crafting and blogging! LOL  Then throw in a sick baby (who shared his germs nicely with Mama) and you just have no energy to create.

However, somewhere in there I did finally start on the invitations to my son's FIRST birthday party!  I cannot believe that he will be one next month.  It's just crazy.  For those of you who know me (and I realize that's probably most of my readers) you know just how far he's come.  Having started out at just 3 pounds and spending 8 weeks in the hospital to where he is now is just amazing.  He will be OVER 20 pounds by his birthday!  I just love my little chunky monkey with all of my heart! :o)

So, I decided on the theme of Curious George for his birthday.  I knew that I wanted to print the actual invitations on velum and have that backed by cardstock, but honestly, I have never printed on velum so I was a bit nervous as to how it was going to come out.  I also had a vision of attaching a small banana shaped button at the top to hold it all together.  Over the course of the past several months I've had this vision in my head as to how I wanted them to come out, but didn't really know if my ideas could come together.  I snapped some pictures to show you my process.

First I designed the worded part of the invitation in Microsoft Word.  I found an image of Curious George that I thought was fun and would look really cute on the invitations and put that in the middle of the text.  Then I wrote the text around the image. 

Next came the actual printing of the invitations onto the velum.  I did a lot of reading as to the best way to do this but I think I was really making a bigger deal out of it than it needed to be.  The process went very smoothly and they printed beautifully.  The one "trick" I found and did use was to change my printer setting to "transparency".  I can't say whether this really made a difference though, since I didn't try it any other way.

Then I knew I needed to be able to mail these, so they needed to fit into the envelopes that I have (standard business size), so I knew how big I could make the cardstock backing (4inches x 9.5 inches).  I actually added 1 inch to the length so I could fold an inch over to make the top flap that would hold the velum.  It looked like this:

Then I lined up the text on the velum so it was in the middle of the cardstock and used my ATG to glue it down.  Then I also glued the cardstock flap down.

Then I flipped it over and used Scotch tape to tape the cardstock to the velum, just to hold it in place while I cut off the excess velum.

Then I just peeled off the little bit of tape that was still on the cardstock.  Thankfully I didn't have any issues with it ripping the cardstock.  I had kind of "unstuck" it before I put it on there anyway buy putting my fingerprints on to remove some of the tack.  After that I rounded to bottom corners with my Martha Stewart corner rounder punch.

After that I glued some yellow ric rack along the edge of the flap.  When I took these pictures (which was the first batch of invitations) I had used Mod Podge for this step.  This worked fine, although it's not the easiest to put on (I ended up using a wooden skewer and rubbing it along the edge) and it bleeds through the ric rack and makes it kind of "crispy" when it dries.  For my second batch I picked up some Tombo Mono Multi Glue which worked a lot better.  First, it has a nice tiny tip so you can apply it to your project straight from the bottle, and second you don't end up with "crispy" ribbon!  But I only have a pic with the Mod Podge.

Just one last step, and that is attaching a cute little banana button in the middle of the top.  See?  Isn't it cute?

At first I thought I'd punch a hole in the top of the invitation and tie a ribbon through the loop on the back of the button, but that proved to be "fruitless" (hahaha...I couldn't resist).  Actually the loop on the button wasn't big enough to go through that many layers so it just looked weird.  So, instead I snipped it off and just adhered the button straight to the invitation with some E6000.

Over all I think it came out very cute.  It wasn't exactly how I had envisioned it, but it still is cute.  The only thing that I don't like is that it's somewhat difficult to see the words "Curious" and "George" since they are in yellow and backed with the brown cardstock.  Also I should have probably used a higher weight cardstock, but now I know for next time.  Live and learn!


Next I hope to show you a wedding card I just made.  Hopefully it won't take me another month to post it!

Happy crafting!
Bridget