DIY Baby Shower Invitations

Happy Sunday everyone, hope you’re all enjoying the last of this pretty Spring weekend. I’ve been spending my time lately, working on throwing a baby show for my best friend who is expecting her first child at the end of April. I’ve never thrown a shower (or even been to one) before but it’s been really fun planning all the details of the day so far. Baby mama decided on a tea party theme. Since she doesn’t know the gender of the baby we figured we may as well just go for something “Lady” oriented. Right away my head was swirling with invite ideas involving the tea party theme. This is what I came up with.

  These invites were actually super simple to make but they can be time consuming. First you need to find a teapot shape you like, I went with the one seen below. (You can always free hand this if you feel confident in your skills) Print the image out on some heavy card stock paper and cut it out carefully. Then you can easily use it to trace out the image onto the paper you’ve chosen for the actual invites. I went with three different colors of paper avoiding “pink” and “blue” as best I could.

  After that, it’s pretty endless in how you can decorate it. I decided to stay simple. I used sewing thread and some ivory colored paper to make a tea bag label which read “A Baby Is Brewing!” I then glued the end of the thread to the top of the invite and attached a regular ribbon which I’d previously tied into mini bows. I also decided to glue the tea bag label in place just to keep it from getting torn off while removing the invite from the envelope. In Microsoft Paint I put together the wording for the invite (which was a mix of me googling and coming up with on the spot) and cut a decorative shape around it.

Viola, your invite is complete!: 

While making these invites I wasn’t thinking too far ahead (I was stuck in a crafty DIY euphoria) One problem I encountered after I completed every invite was that these suckers were too big for every standard envelope I could find. I wasn’t willing to compromise the cuteness of the invites by getting an ugly giant manila type envelope so I rolled up my sleeves and went DIY on this task as well. This project was actually way more complicated to complete then the invites themselves.

    Each card required two individual pieces of regular 8x11 craft paper to complete which is quite a bit of paper so make sure you have a lot on hand. It’s hard to see in the picture but you need to draw out all the measurements based on the size of your invite onto the paper. This will be the front of the envelope that gets addressed and stamped. Be sure to leave about a 1/2 inch gap where you can fold over the side of the envelope. When you’ve cut out the lines it should look something like this: Each side will be folded over and glued. To make the folding process easier, cut out little triangle sections at each corner as seen below:

 

  Once it’s all cut out it’s going to look like this when the invite is place on top. You can see there is a lot of space around every part of teapot which is crucial.

Fold each corner over and make sure your invite can still sit comfortably inside the paper.

 

The next step is much easier. Grab that second piece of paper I told you you were going to need and cut out a rectangle shape piece that covers the three sides but leaves the top open to be folded down and sealed.

Your envelope is complete! I decided to pretty mine up a bit and use some of the ivory paper and ribbon I included on the invite to decorate the envelope.

 

However, I did have to then put each envelope in a velum casing just to be safe because sometimes the post off won’t accept mail with protruding ribbons on it like this because it can get caught in their machines (I realized this post hot gluing ribbon to the envelope) So if you want to avoid the headache then find some other way to decorate your envelope.

  

The baby shower is next week so after that I’ll share a lot more of fun projects I’ve been working on with you guys. Baby mama reads this and I don’t want to spoil too much of what’s coming. Hope this was helpful and if you have any tips, tricks or stories I’m always happy to have them shared here at Reckless Bliss!

 

(All photos property of Reckless Bliss)