Continuing in my series about the Rubber Ducky Baby Sprinkle I threw for my friend Jennie, today we’ll talk about the invitations. I was perfectly capable of designing them myself from scratch, but I needed some inspiration and a swift kick in the ass to get going.
As inspired as I was to do my best, I was feeling a bit lazy. I was also still thinking that this wouldn’t be a big deal and turn into what it turned into! So I searched for ideas I thought I could replicate and ultimately just ended up buying the file for these Boy Baby Sprinkle Invitations from PartyPrintery on Etsy. Since I have Photoshop I just asked them for the .psd file to do the customization on my own and, of course, being a freak that I am I went WAY over on customizing! Because JoAnn Fabrics was having an awesome sale on paper, I bought cards with a bit too much haste, not realizing that (1) they were the wrong size and (2) that they were folded cards, not flat 5″ x 7″ cards. So I had to return & get the right ones (which ended up biting me in the butt since I’d been able to use a coupon the first time) and I had to expand the card to fit that format. I found I already had the fonts that they used in the invite, so making changes and expanding was not hard, and I’m a perfectionist so I had to get it right.
The outside I designed from scratch except for using the corner dots from the original invitations from PartyPrintery. I ended up having to print them on my Canon PIXMA iP2702 Inkjet Photo Printer so I could get the borderless printing I was looking for and my main printer, the Canon PIXMA MX420 Wireless Office All-in-One Printer wouldn’t do it. So everything was printed on the photo printer and came out looking super great! In retrospect, I wish I’d taken a screen shot of the more rounded ducky I used from Cricut Design Space for everything else and used that in the invite so the duck would match exactly, but that’s a little detail that only a crazy person like me might notice. This duck is from a free custom shapes file for Photoshop I downloaded eons ago.
The day of the sprinkle, I learned something interesting. Apparently very few people actually turned the dang invite over to read my note on the back that mentioned where Jennie & Tim were registered for the few baby things they would need and noting that it’s a potluck. Who doesn’t read the whole card?! I was told that people don’t, but seriously, the inside also says to please bring a dish, so I’m still not taking the blame for that one!
I’d seen many interesting ways to address envelopes on Pinterest as well, so put together a design for the envelope too. I also did not find any stickers that were what I wanted, so I upgraded to a Xyron 250 Sticker Machine from my 150 and cut the duckies and made envelope seals myself. There was a cute baby boy sayings paper I saw at JoAnn’s that really didn’t fit in anywhere else, so it worked perfectly for the envelope seals. And I was very happy with the permanent adhesive on the Xyron sticker machine. I’d only used repositionable adhesive before. I like that you can feed them through as close together as they’ll bear to not waste valuable sticker tape.
I had to print the fancy addressed envelopes out on the Canon PIXMA iP2702 as well. It was slightly a chore since I had to save every individual one as a different image file to print that way, but I loved the way they looked so it was definitely worth it! Of course, it’s the one thing I think I forgot to take a photo of, so you’ll just have to believe me that they were awesome!
I slapped some Celebrate stamps on these bad boys and inundated my poor mail carrier with them for a couple of days as they’d fit through the mail slot in my door. Some seemed to arrive almost immediately, but some did not, which certainly isn’t anything I had control over, but still frustrating since a lot of people never RSVPd and didn’t show, so I almost wonder if some got lost in the mail. Grr.
Other posts in the Rubber Ducky Baby Shower Series:
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