My First Big Craft Project - Baby Shower Invitations for my BFF

Hey everyone!  I know I've been a bit quiet this week but I have a lot going on!  Summer is taking its toll on me.  The kids want attention, attention, attention!  It's great to have them with me though and we've been on several new adventures.  Hopefully I will be able to share some of them with you an upcoming date when I get those pages scrapped.  In the meantime, I wanted to blog about my very first big crafting project.  As many of you know, my BFF Brandy has twins, and last year, I offered to throw her a baby shower.  Of course, in order to outdo myself I decided that I was going to handmake all of the invitations.  She thought I was crazy, but I have a Cricut so I felt confident that I could mass produce something spectacular.  Here are the invitations that I designed.

As you can see from the invitation, Brandy was expecting twins (boy/girl) and she wanted bright, fun colored invitations.  I based the invitation on a Splitcoaststampers tutorial on crisscross cards.  I created a cut file in Design Studio using the George cartridge to create the card, which is actually two pieces that I glued together.


One of my favorite things to do is to make the same design but use slightly different colors and/or papers.  I made the card in four base colors and then alternated the pattern paper that appears on each.  No two invitations are alike, but they are all coordinated by using the same Martha Stewart paper pack.  At the time it was sold at Walmart where I picked four of these babies up for cheap, but as many of you know WalMart doesn't carry the Martha Stewart line any longer.  I recently saw this paper pack being sold in the Martha Stewart isle at Michael's so it is still available for anyone who is interested.  


The "It's a Boy, It's a Girl" circle sentiment was generated on my computer using Word Art.  I printed it on white cardstock and cut it out using a Spellbinder circle die.   The stork, rattle, and baby umbrella were all cut from DCWV glitter paper using the New Arrival cartridge.  I cut the mats out for these embellishments using George. The invitation slides into the holder and the writing was generated using Word and printed on vellum.  I attached it to a white mat and then put it on the other side of several different cuts of the Martha Stewart paper.   


Had I known it at the time, I might have saved myself a lot of design time and trouble by using the crisscross card that is on the Tie The Knot cartridge.  It is identical to the one I made for this project, other than the inside are scalloped shaped.  Here are a few pictures of cars I made using this Cricut cut.

You live and you learn right?  So the next thing I did for this shower was create diaper cakes for the actual shower.  Since Brandy knew she was having a boy and a girl, I decided to make two and make them gender specific. 

The paper I used for each of the bands from Basic Grey and I layered it on top of shimmery Coordinations cardstock.  The images on the bands are from A Child's Year.  They were cut using the same Coordinations paper and blinged out with faux pearls.  We also topped each with fresh flowers and laid flowers around the base of the diaper cakes.  I love the way these turned out. Brandy adored them as well.


My final craft contribution to the shower were the gift boxes.  I used a heart shaped hexagon box created by Denise Hill from PaperPastime.  I used the exact same Martha Stewart paper that I used for the invitations.  I wrapped them with a little ribbon, stamped a "Thank you" sentiment on a small die cut with one of my Spellbinders tags, and Walla! I was done.  Here they are:

So there you have it!  Brandy and the guests loved everything and I really had a ball making it all.  Of course I told her that I will never hand make 50+ invitations again.  She was my first and only!


Thanks for stopping by and please leave me a comment if you like what you see!