One
of my dearest friends is pregnant with her first little one, and it's a
girl! Living in a house full of boys, I get extra excited at any
opportunity to get crafty with my favorite color, PINK! Her
mother-in-law and I are throwing a fun co-ed shower for the happy couple
and we decided on a pink and gold Twinkle Twinkle Little Star theme. I
immediately took to Pinterest and have been pinning like crazy. When
it came time for the invites, the parents-to-be decided they wanted an
email invitation. I went to Evite and
Paperless Post and while they had
some great design choices, they didn't have exactly what I was looking
for. I don't know about you, but once I get an idea in my head, I get
stuck on it and nothing else will do. So, to PicMonkey I went. If you
have never used PicMonkey, get on it. I absolutely love this site.
It's a great tool for bloggers looking to spice up their blog pics, but
it is also perfect for designing your own invitations. Did I mention
that it's FREE! They do have a Royale membership that has a few extra
features, fonts, and overlays, but I've always managed to get by with
the free version.
To make this invite I went to
PicMonkey and clicked on the Design option.
That will bring you to a page that looks like this:
On
the left you will see the basic edits available to you. First you want
to pick the color of your card, if you are going with a white card,
skip this step. I wanted pink so under Canvas Color I played around
until I got exactly the shade of pink that I wanted. Once you are happy
with the color, click apply.
Next you want to add in
your decorations, I decided to keep it simple with just a few gold stars
in the top right corner. From the little menu on the left, click on
the butterfly. This will give you a bunch of little shapes you can use
as decorations.
I
clicked on the Stars because, um, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Stay
with me people. Of course you can use whatever you want. Keep in mind
that anything with the little crown icon is a Royale feature so you will
have to pony up to use those. I picked a nice basic star and then
played around with the color until I got a shade of gold that I was
happy with. Then I copied the heart and resized it to get a few
different sizes and rotated some of them to create visual interest.
Finally
I clicked on the Tt from the menu on the left and inserted text boxes
for all of the text I wanted to enter. I used the same shade of gold as
the stars. One cool thing to keep in mind with text is that in
addition to their fonts (non-Royale options are somewhat limited), you
can use any fonts that you have on your own computer, yay! Once you
have it how you want it, click save, name it, and save it to your
computer. I was super excited with how this turned out!
In
case you are thinking to yourself, "Wow Lauren, this looks great except
for those random black boxes," I just added those on top for this post
to protect their privacy. Once you have the invitation saved to your
computer you have a couple of options. You can have them printed (or
print them yourself if you have a good printer) and mail them out. The
parents-to-be wanted their invitations emailed out so I had to find an
online invitation service that would let me upload my own design. After
a little bit of searching, I found a site called
Celebrations
that will allow you to upload your own design. It's a free service,
unless you want it ad free in which case you have to pay to upgrade.
This means that with a little bit of creativity and some time at your
computer, you can design, send out, and manage RSVPs for your own custom
invitations for FREE!
