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.

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!

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.

And here is the completed invitation!

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!

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!

I stamped the envelopes with more jungle animals.

And I stamped a small hippo on the back flap of the invitations.

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!

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. 😉