My friend P was pregnant - she just had her baby two weeks early - and as we were due to meet with my other school friends at my house for a barbecue, we decided it would be fun to combine the barbecue with a baby shower. I wanted to make a bit of effort for her so decided to make some invitations to send to everyone who was coming.
I had some card blanks in the shape of a pram which I bought ages ago, but have since decided I prefer normal-shaped cards. It can actually be quite hard to decorate a card shaped like a shoe for instance! I thought the pram cards would work really well though as invitations, and as they didn’t need to be proper cards I cut each one in half along the join, making two.
P didn't know if she’s having a boy or a girl so I wanted the cards to have a gender-neutral colour but at the same time didn’t want to go with yellow like I often do. I’d recently bought some lovely (and quite cheap) strawberry pattern paper plates and cups from a brilliant shop called Tiger which I thought I could use at the barbecue, then hit upon the idea of making it a strawberry-themed baby shower.
I’d also bought a pack of printed papers from Tiger (they sell all sorts!) that had several pages with strawberry prints. I covered the card blanks with the strawberry paper as the starting point.
I never do much rubber stamping but have realised recently that it can look really nice – and professional – if you stamp a message onto a small piece of card and mount that on top of the card. I had a look on Ebay and bought a ‘baby shower’ stamp for a few pounds which is gorgeous- I love the font and the size was perfect for this project (though it’s not something I expect I will use very often!). I knew that I had some wedding stamps from a job lot I bought once at a car boot sale so fished them out; I had three with the words ‘invitation’ (wedding and evening) but unfortunately two of them were so old and worn that you can’t read the words when you stamp. The third one, a wedding invitation stamp, did work, so I was able to stamp it onto red card (to go with the strawberry colour) and cut off the word ‘wedding’. You just need to be creative sometimes!
I mounted the ‘invitation’ and ‘baby shower’ words using foam sticky pads and then did the same with a couple of handwritten pieces so I could add the date and the mum-to-be’s name.
On the other side of the card I wrote the details of the party.
I was really pleased with how these turned out and my friends said they were very cute! I will shortly be blogging about the baby shower itself if you are looking for ideas.
I'm sending this to the Daring Cardmakers challenge as their theme is new beginnings, and that's exactly right with a new baby!
I'm also sending it to the challenge run by Lil Patch of Crafty Friends as this week it's 'anything goes'.
