Party Planning - Invitations

With Adalyn's birthday 15 days away, the party planning is getting serious!   Invitations have been created and are being mailed out to guests.  Since I've been taking a lot of pictures of little Addie I bought myself a late Christmas gift.  Photoshop Elements 10.

I knew when planning this party several months ago that I wanted to attempt to create the invites myself and Photoshop kind of has a reputation for creating invites.  I really didn't think it would be that difficult and had pinned for lots of ideas on what I wanted.  I was wrong.  Photoshop is really overwhelming and you need some time to get familiar with the program and how it works to really get good at it.  

So my original plan to create a cute invite with lots of great graphics was tossed.  My back up idea came from one of my favorite blogs, Young House Love.  Sherry & John created Clara's birthday invitations in Photoshop but it was simple picture of Clara with some basic edits.  I didn't want to do the exact same photo so I changed things up a bit.

Here are some shots from our photo session.

You'll notice some shots where with the headband and pearls and others were without.  I wanted to have a variety to choose.  We were lucky we got a few shots with the pearls not in her mouth.  

So after our mini photo shoot in the living room, I ran the camera to the office and loaded up Photoshop.  Like I mentioned before, it ain't easy to work that program.  So after a solid hour and half of deciding which photo to use as well as adding and removing layers, I came up with this.

Next I had to find a site to print the invites for cheap and rather quickly since I waited until just over 2 weeks before the party to get with it.  I remembered my blog crush John & Sherry ordered their invites through Winkflash.

Off to the site I went and found that they were running 40% off their photo cards!

I ordered 25 5x7 matte cards which are priced at $0.82 per card for a total of $20.50.  I noticed when I logged in that Winkflash was running a 40% special on all cards, so I applied the code CARDS40 and received $8.20 in savings that I can use towards something else for her party.  The new total of $12.30 made the cards $0.49 per card!  So after shipping & handling fees, I walked away spending $17.30 on 25 invitations!  Not bad, considering we could have spent much closer to $50 for someone to design and create the invitations for me.  

The order summary told me I'd receive the cards on Saturday, which made me nervous since I wanted to ship by Saturday out to guests.  When I came home on Thursday, I had a package from Winkflash waiting for me!  It took only 3 days to place my order and receive the shipment.

So today I'll be addressing and mailing out invitations to arrive to guests.  I can't believe we're only 2 weeks away from her party!

Don't forget our giveaway ends on Monday!