Bring on the craftiness!

For those of you who don't know, I absolutely LOVE to throw a party. Love it. My first couple of jobs involved event planning, but now that I work in sales (from home in my pajamas mind you) I get my kicks from my own personal social events. I am the type of person who finds no greater joy than to make a spreadsheets to track RSVP's and expenses even though only I will see it, using Tahoma 10 font and filling the whole page in with a white background so that it hides those ugly gridlines. Quirky? Absolutely, but I am who I am and it seems to be what I was made to do. I would much rather sit around planning parties and events for myself and for friends than just about anything else in the world.

So around comes my sister's baby shower this past Sunday. Normally I would go to a cute website and order pretty pre-printed invitations, but that just didn't seem good enough this time. You see, for my bridal shower my sister created the most gorgeous hand-made invitations I have ever seen! Seriously... she should sell them. We're talking so pretty that I still plan to frame mine and hang it on the wall at our house. Unfortunately I don't have a picture or else I would definitely post it, so if you really want to see it I'll dig one up and put it up here eventually. So between that and my new goal to become more "crafty" as I mentioned on Monday (because everyone- and I mean everyone- is crafty in the Midwest... it's as if they were born with a gene that the rest of us didn't get whether it be knitting, quilting, scrapbooking, cake decorating... you name it!), I decided to return the favor and create my own invitations for her party.

Since craftiness is a fairly new thing for me, I spent a fair amount of time on Google looking at pictures of other people's creations. What in the world did we do before the Internet? I finally decided to try to make something that looked like a diaper and would act as a sleeve for the actual printed invitation. Based on my Internet findings, my first brilliant idea was to wrap the inner invitation in white felt, which I can assure you will not end up looking like a diaper at all. While a good idea in theory, it looked more like an old-fashioned nurses hat than a diaper. With this in mind, I knew it would have to be paper all the way. So without further to do, here are the steps on how to make some super-cute (and fairly easy... hey, even I could do this one!) baby shower invitations:

First, here is what you will need:

• Printable cardstock for the inner invitation (1 per 6 invitations)... I used light green since she doesn't know what she's having yet. I also used white and glued the two pieces together to make it fancier, but this is just an option
• A glue stick (if you decide to go with my method above)
• Cute printed paper (8x11) for the diaper (1 page per invitation). I found that white was just too plain so I went to a scrapbooking store and found paper with butterflies, flowers, and swirlies on it. If you know the gender of the baby, there is A LOT of cute pink and blue patterned options
• Scissors - regular and craft scissors for the details. If you have a slicer, that will save you some time, too
• A hole puncher
• A felt tipped pen
• Large safety pins- I searched for actual diaper pins but did not come across any
• Invitation envelopes
• A cute baby-themed stamp and an ink pad (optional)

To start, take a diaper pattern (which can be found here) and use it to cut out all of the "diapers" on your patterned paper. If the pattern goes one direction or the other, make sure that the flap that faces front shows the pattern right-side up. Below is the pattern I found online (left) next to one that I ended up cutting out (right)... I opted not to cut all of the frills out and used craft scissors in a later step instead to make it a little faster. Either method works.

Next, fold up the "diaper" and secure the front with a safety pin. To fold up the diaper, fold it in half vertically and then pull the side flaps in. The one shown below has been folded, and then as I mentioned earlier, I took craft scissors and cut the frillies on the leg holes.


I set that part aside and started on the inner-invitation. Using Microsoft Word or Publisher or any program really, type the information using only 1/6 of the page. The space will be limited, but the diaper sleeve ends up being about the size of your hand. You can either use one side or both sides of the paper depending on how much information you have. In our case, we put a cute little phrase on one side and then all of the information on the other. I also printed one on the green cardstock and one on the white cardstock, frilled up the edges of the white one with craft scissors, and glued them together for a bit of a fancier look. Lastly, punch a hole in the top and tie a ribbon in a bow through it to make it easier to pull out of the diaper sleeve. Below is the components of my finished product as well as one put together:

There are so many ways you can go with this. If you have cute hand-writing you could probably just hand-write them all, but I'm not there yet in my craftiness. Or you could glue the insert into the diaper sleeve since almost everyone I talked to said that they undid the safety pin and opened my invitation up, not knowing that they did not have to go through that extra step. But regardless of what you choose, I think they turn out to be super cute.

Lastly, if you're still wanting to personalize it a little more, take your stamp and the ink pad and use it somewhere on the invitation envelope. I think it adds a nice touch.

So that's about the extent of what I can share in terms of being crafty today... I'm still a work in progress, but they were a big hit! And this posting only assures me that I should never start a cooking or a how-to blog unless I plan to have REALLY LONG posts. Because honestly, I could have added WAY more details than I did, but hopefully this is more than enough to get my point enough. Happy crafting!

And PS - a post about her actual shower will soon follow, too!