I’m Happy When I’m Planning

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The nights are long, but the years are oh so short.

When Crafts Attack

As you know, I’ve been trucking away on projects for my sister’s upcoming Bridal shower. We are having the party in early August and its going to be a ‘Garden Tea Party’ theme. In my last post I detailed how we can get super caught up in being BUSY – so I’m trying to take my time and really enjoy the process of crafting.

“Paper” crafts

I am a big fan of cards, invitations, and all sorts of paper-work. I spent 4 years working in an artist’s supply shop during University and amassed quite the collection of interesting papers. My favourites are translucent papers: vellum, mylar, and even fabric-like papers (if you can call it that?). You can add these to fun paintings for extra texture, or use them on invitations and cards for an extra flair. However, when trying to create invitations in large quantities, my go-to is Photoshop. You can create amazing looks for any kind of invitation – bridal shower, baby shower, wedding, etc.

This is a snapshot of the invitations I created for my bridal shower: I had everything printed in black & white and then added double sticky tape to the chevrons and coated them in glitter from the craft store. I used pale pink and gold to match the theme of the shower. This shows the pink glitter in place, but before I made it to the gold glitter. The scroll was from a free image that I found via Pinterest and the fonts were ones I found for free on random font searches (dafont is a good place to check!)

I created a design for my own wedding invitations all on the computer as well. It was a lot of fun and also saved us a good penny. I knew the look I wanted, all I had to do was scour the web looking for free fonts and brushes to make my idea come to life. Currently, I’m loving pinterest for different font combinations! I created some of my own brushes in photshop to use throughout our invites to make everything flow and match. It really is a great tool.

I saved the final draft as a JPG with a few copies on one “8.5 x 11” sized file instead of printing one image per sheet. This way we just had to cut out the individual images with a paper cutter and affix them to the backing card stock using double sticky tape. It helped us save a lot of money because we used less paper – I chose a dark green mica card stock for the backing and a white sparkly card stock for the “information” squares (the part where we printed out the details).

Currently, I am creating Bridal Shower invites for my sister. I went browsing through pinterest to get some ideas – I wanted to make it a kind of “garden tea-party” theme. I’m trying to use colours that make me think of the fall because that is when she’s getting married, BUT I could very well change my mind and make it all summery colours – photoshop is great like that. I’m going to take you through my process of creating these lovely Tea Party themed Bridal Shower Invites!

I plan on printing these as matte finished photos, and 4×6″ is a great size for fitting into envelopes without needing extra postage. I went in search for some free clip art (google image search is a great start). I saved and opened an image of a teapot. By clicking “ctrl + t” you bring up the transform tool. Just hold down “shift” and drag one of the corners to resize the teapot (or whatever image you choose). The shift key will allow you to keep the current proportions.

The 4×6 “canvas” with teapot clipart. I added colour to the background and set the teapot to a separate layer.

I like to do every little step on a new layer. This means its much easier to make adjustments afterwards without having to change the whole thing. On a new layer, create some text: “Time for Tea with the Bride to Be” has a nice ring to it! As long as your font is legible and not too busy, it will print out just fine.

Next, I used a font that was entirely scroll work – select the scroll you like and adjust the size the same way you’d change your font size. If you use an image of a scroll (instead of a font), you can adjust the size the same way we changed the teapot in the steps above. Add the bride-to-be’s name and Voila!

Underneath the teapot and scroll, add the key information: Location, Date, Time, etc. (I blurred out that information as we haven’t had the big to-do yet). You could also add the information about the bride’s registry here, or as a fun “tea-themed” sparkle, create a separate image in the shape of a square. Cut this out, add some fun string or ribbon affixing it to the main invite. It’s almost like the little tab on a teabag. This is of course just some extra pizzaz, if you’re worried about guests seeing this information, just add it to the bottom of the tea-pot image. I added some lovely flowers in complimentary colours to make it more garden like.

Once you’re happy with all of your colours and such, you can merge all of the layers (ctrl+ shift+ E I believe) and save it as a JPEG. I would also suggest saving the non-merged file as a “.psd” (photoshop file) so that you can open it and make changes at any time before it goes to print.
Hope this fun DIY post was helpful – it really is great being able to create your own invites and cards. All one of a kind like you!

xo