Birthday Bonanza Part 1: DIY Invites

As I mentioned on Monday, the end of this month is my little girl's 1st birthday.  Since I was not at all crafty a few years ago when my boys had their first birthdays, this one is pretty exciting for me.  I've been oohing and aahing over all the amazing homemade parties I've seen, but

1. I did not want to be a crazy lady scrambling to put a million things together at 3am that morning
2. I'm trying to be frugal, so spending a lot is not an option

So, I figured if I started early enough and just did one thing at a time I could do the entire thing myself and still have most of my sanity by the big day.  Well....we'll see how that goes, but I'm trying right?

Ok, I decided to go for a tea party theme, which is girly and pretty but can have a lot of options.  First step was making some pretty invitations that didn't cost a lot.  The fancy design was surprisingly easy thanks to my lovely Cricut & Sure Cuts A Lot software (can you tell I'm in love with this now?  My sewing machine is starting to get jealous).   I'd gotten the files for these layered invitations & envelopes for free when I'd purchased some cupcake wrapper files from a very cool site called svgcuts.com.  (**their blog has loads of FREE holiday and themed files too, so I highly recommend checking it out & downloading some asap**).  I'm not being compensated to say this, but seriously, their files are awesome!!

I got the cardstock on sale for 40% off at Joann's and already had the printed paper in my paper stash.  For the teapot cutouts I just googled for teapot images and when I found one I liked I saved it, imported into SCAL and changed the size to make what I needed.  That's it!

To make the cards, using my Cricut I cut out the back in pink cardstock, the middle bit with printed paper and then added the invite portion I'd typed up & printed into the flap part, taped it all together and added a little pouring teapot to the top corner.

I made the matching envelopes the same way, using the envelope front & back files, folding & taping them together and then attaching a larger teapot cutout onto the front, so I could write the address on it.

Other than a bit of time to assemble everything, these cost under $4.00 to make.  A few months ago (before I had a clue about using a Cricut or how to do any paper crafts in general), I'd ordered some personalized baptism invites that were pretty basic and relatively inexpensive as far as those invite places go, but the price was still staggering by comparison.  I was really happy with how these turned out & definitely will make more for other stuff in the future.

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