An Invitation

All the women in my family love tea, and we all love tea parties. I figure I should take that as a sign that a Mother's Day tea party is in order for this year. I have some very cool ideas for laying the table and displaying the goodies that I'll share after the fact, but today I wanted to show you the invitations I made.

I was inspired by these Target plates my mom and I found at Goodwill a few years ago. I just love how girly and vintage looking they are. I don't get a chance to use them very often, so they will definitely be put to use for the party. Since I love them so much, I thought I'd design the invitations to match.

I am very good at assembling things and very bad at drawing, so I knew I would need to start with some clip art. I don't have any fancy designer software on my computer, so I used plain old Microsoft Word.

This cute clip art was close enough to the flower design on the plates to make a good starting point. The key to manipulating clip art is a little trick called grouping and ungrouping. It is definitely worth reading the help section in word on grouping to get a good overview of this, but I'll give you the gist.

First insert the clip art in a blank document. Now, on the drawing tool bar at the bottom of the screen you should be able to select ungroup.

This allows you to manipulate every part of the clip art. You can delete elements, move them around, and change the size and color. When you're done, just click on regroup to save the new image.

I took the bee clip art from above and tweaked it to make the two flowers on this invitation.

Then I added two text box borders and matching polka dots to mimic the edge of the plate.

I had to make my own envelopes because I chose to make the invites a bit over sized.

I just folded and glued paper to fit around the invite, then folded and glued the bottom manila envelope style. The top is left open so the invitation can be pulled out by the ribbon. These will be hand delivered on Friday, so they won't have to stand up to the postal service.

So, If any of you are as neurotic as me and would like to match your invitations to your plates, or shoes, or wallpaper, or whatever, now you know how!

<3

Hattie