My baby shower invitations

Earlier in Hardwork Heaven I mentioned my Baby Shower and all the crafts I attempted to set up our special day. It was a lot of work but soooo worth it.

 

 

 I mentioned I would come back and write about how I made everything. I was hoping to get it done before my baby came a long but unfortunately late in my pregnancy I had bad swelling in my hands making typing very difficult and painful.

 The good news is our beautiful baby girl Lara arrived healthy and well on Christmas eve! An absolute dream for me to have a healthy baby girl! Even more excuses to indulge in my crafts now I have my baby girl to make them for! And now my hands are improving it's a lot easier to type.

 

Well as promised I'm finally writing about my baby shower in between feeds!

 

Well the first thing I made for Lara's shower was the invitations.

 

I had a slightly different image in my head but this is what I came up with with the resources and the budget that was available.

 

I wanted something personal and modern not so much cutesy like a traditional invitation and I also wanted them to mirror the theme I had planned, which also evolved with the resources available.
My theme was

Ladybugs and Indulgent Chocolate.
 I wanted to have a afternoon tea with an indulgent chocolate table and I have always loved lady beetles so this way I could incorporate the chocolate with the baby shower theme. It was sooo me!

 

I did lots of research into different styles of baby showers before I decided what I wanted. I spent a lot of time on Google going through images for ideas. Once I decided on my theme I gathered my supplies.
My first step was to create my invitations was to googled some poems to help with the wording.

This is the link to the site with the poems I used. Heaps of great ideas. I would defiantly recommend trying this site. I cut and pasted the poems I liked to a word file where I played with fonts and the arrangements of the poems.

 

Below you can see the final result of the wording of my invitations. Please feel free to used my layout. 

 

Front of Invitation

 

We would be honoured to have your company at

Katrina’s

Baby Shower

A brand new baby is on the way, so come celebrate with a special day!

We're having a get together and a few little treats, in honour of a new baby we soon all will meet!

 

 

Back of Invitation

 

 

Dear

Come join us for an indulgent afternoon tea

on

13^th October 2012

2pm till 3.30pm

at

12 T------- A

U------- 3---

RSVP by 30^thSeptember 2012

Katrina - 0------

We'll share our secret and give you a clue; our new baby will look great in... Fooled you!

Boy or girl, we simply can't say, we'll have to wait until the big day!

Please don’t feel you have to bring a gift.

Presents are great but your company is the bigger treasure.

 

  I'm not big on making people feel they have to spend money. You never know what situation people are in so I gave my guests the option of bringing a gift. I didn't want them to feel obligated to spend their hard earned money just to attend. I would rather have my friends around just to have some fun. I don't need expensive gifts. I feel people spend far too much money on presents for people outside of their families these days.  

Once the wording was finished I printed it all out on a silver dotted paper. I later changed this to parchment paper because the ink started to rub off the paper and you could see the glue through it!

 

You can see my invitations are just a piece of pre-cut card, with tissue paper cut to size, glued on top of the card and then the paper with the wording, glued on top of the tissue paper.

 

 I added a ladybug to one corner and diamond stickers to all sides to hold the paper down.

Originally this was to stop the paper from curling while the glue dried but it just looked so pretty I repeated the diamond stickers on all my invitations. Each invitation has a hand tied, brown ribbon glued at the top and to my surprise the blue stick you can see in the photo below is all I had to use. I really thought this glue wouldn't be strong enough but I made sure the ribbon was well covered and they all stuck.

  

 

On the reverse side I have the details of the party, much the same as the front, with the same layers of card, tissue paper and the printed wording sheet. I have repeated the diamond stickers, ladybug and this time added a red hand tied ribbon to emphasise the lady bug theme.

I was really pleased with the final result. I also added a magnet on the back so the invitations could be stuck to the fridge so my party would not be forgotten.

 

 Below you can see the beginnings of some invitations in white. I had so many extra people I thought of at the last minute that I ran out of brown paper.

The invitation were place in an envelope and sent out! I got so many lovely comments on my invitations but I have to admit they were very time consuming to make. It took me two week end to complete them all! This was from planning to completion. They are something I will have forever as a reminder of how special this pregnancy was too me. I've all ways wanted to be a Mum and I have never been so happy!