Skip to Content

Jungle Party!

My son’s first birthday is rapidly approaching, and I’m so excited to throw him a birthday party that I decided to make all of his birthday invitations… a month early! Like I said, I’m just a little bit excited! lol!

Before I could start making the invitations, I had to find some envelopes. I found some bright green ones at Hobby Lobby for a great price. Now that I knew the size of my envelope, I could start designing the invitations. I chose three papers to work with: 12×12 giraffe-patterned paper, 12×12 bright green paper (matches my envelopes perfectly!), and 12×12 off white paper (matches the backround of the giraffe paper). Here I’ve already cut them to size, the largest being the giraffe paper at 6×5 inches.
IMG 3546
I wanted to thread some ribbon through the top layer of paper so I chose some giraffe ribbon to match the giraffe paper. I used my Fiskars border punch to punch the holes for the ribbon. I also used my grass punch to make, you guessed it, some grass!
IMG 3547
I have a super cute set of jungle animal stamps from Autumn Leaves called Mindy’s Zoo. I used the large giraffe stamp for the invitations. I used some of the other stamps on the envelope, but we’ll get to that later. I also stamped everything with brown ink to match the rest of my theme.
zoo
And here is the completed invitation!
IMG 3624
Being a t-shirt designer, I have literally over 1000 fonts on my computer. This also comes in handy with my scrapbooking and other craft projects. The font I used for “You’re Invited” is called Crazy Zoo. Each letter of the alphabet is an animal! This alphabet set does not come with punctuation, so I simply used another font for the apostrophe. Isn’t this too cute? And it fits in so well with my theme!
IMG 3627
A close up of the grass and giraffe. I needed 4 pieces of grass to run across the top sheet of the invitation. I used the same bright green paper that is matted on the invite. I ran the grass through my Xyron X to turn all of the pieces of grass into stickers for easy attachment. For the giraffe, I colored all of his spots, hooves, and ears with a Souffle puff pen (the nude color). I then chalked the giraffe with brown chalk and cut him out with my X-acto swivel knife. I attached him with pop dots for a 3-D effect, but not too 3-D since I don’t want to have to pay extra postage!
IMG 3625
I stamped the envelopes with more jungle animals.
IMG 3628
And I stamped a small hippo on the back flap of the invitations.
IMG 3629
All in all I made 20 invitations (one being for myself, of course!). I find that an assembly line method works best for me when doing redundant projects (ie. cut all the paper at once, cut and attach all the ribbon at once, punch all the grass at once, etc.)

Now all I need to do is address the invitations (using my brown Zig marker) and buy some stamps. I think I’ll get these cute “Celebrate!” stamps from the post office. Then my jungle party invitations will be ready to send out!
celebrate
And, just so you know, I’m not crazy enough to attempt this every year. I just felt that since it was my son’s first birthday, I wanted to do something extra special. Next year, I’ll be sure to find some cute invitations to *purchase* for his party. 😉

I have started truncating my posts to avoid having my content stolen. I hope you’ll click over to finish reading the post. Thank you for understanding!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

DelilahIris

Saturday 24th of July 2010

These are super cute!! You should enter them into the contest/giveaway at my site - do-it-yourself-invitations.com

There sadly hasn't been a whole lot of entries so you could have a pretty good chance at winning! :-)

crazyoatie

Tuesday 11th of May 2010

Your invitations are so cute! I'm currently planning a giraffe themed party for my twins' first birthday and I'm looking for giraffe paper like what you used. Can I ask where you got it? Thanks so much!

Amber

Monday 10th of August 2009

These are the cutest invites I've ever seen!!! You did an awesome job!!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.