April | 2015 | Saw it, Pinned it, Did it!

We are currently preparing for our son’s 9th birthday coming up in a few weeks. This year his party will have a ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ theme.

Of course I have been adding ideas to my Pinterest board ‘How to Train Your Dragon party’.

The invitations were sent out yesterday, so I am going to share how I did them. I am a member of a local mums’ Facebook page, and it never ceases to amaze me how often mums post asking where to buy branded party merchandise. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for these things, but if you have a bit of time to search for ideas you can come up with your very own version. Cheaper, personal, and the birthday child will love them!

So, back to the invitations…

I found a design I liked and looked for some images that could be used. Completely inadvertently, my son chose the same image as the design we were ‘borrowing’. (You’ll see it on the Pinterest board above.) I saved the picture to my computer, then opened it with PicMonkey – a free photo editing site. I find this site very easy to use, but you can use whatever editing tools you prefer 🙂

To the picture I added a text banner (overlay) with the party details. This is a recently learned skill for me, and I found the instructions here. It’s on my Social Media board if anyone’s interested. On PicMonkey it’s the butterfly icon that adds the overlay. I faded the banner so it didn’t completely cut out the picture, but allowed the text to stand out. In this case I used a stock font (Poetson One) that looked similar to the official movie font. For previous parties I have done a search for ‘*name of movie* font free download’, but that was not available this time. In the past I have found Adventure Time, Pokémon, Lazytown and other fonts available for free download. Doing this makes for a more professional looking invitation, or whatever else you add text to for the party. Dafont has a good range and I have found what I wanted here before.

In the bottom left-hand corner I added another banner and the party details. For obvious reasons I haven’t included the final design here.

I usually email invitations out in preference to printing them. Of course it saves on ink, but it also goes straight to the parent without getting lost in the bottom of a school bag, only to be discovered the day after the party. It also saves the feelings of children who haven’t been invited. I leave it up to my son who he invites, although I do occasionally make ‘suggestions’! Not everyone in the class/team/group etc gets invited to every party, but you don’t want to be obvious about it. Of course there are other ways of unobtrusively handing out invitations, so do what works for you 🙂

How do you come up an idea for party invitations?

I will add the rest of the party details in a few weeks – after the party! Fingers crossed the wild weather we have been experiencing lately clears as we are holding the party in a local park!

Linking up with:

Pin Junkie

Pin-n-Tell

A Handful of Everything

Boogieboard Cottage

Made From Pinterest

4u – With Love

Last weekend my friend celebrated her 40th birthday with a ‘come as someone famous’ party. As you can imagine there was much discussion on which character to go as and what to wear!

I was completely blank on who to go as, but I started thinking about dark haired ladies (since I am one!) and Audrey Hepburn came to mind. And once Audrey is in your mind, she won’t leave!

So I started a Pinterest board – Audrey Hepburn costume – to collate the ideas I found. Firstly, this was a fun, dress-up party, not a look-a-like competition so I was just going for the ‘essence’ of Audrey. Audrey was 32 when she filmed the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s and she played the role of Holly Golightly, a girl in her late teens. Now, it has been quite a while since I was 32 (and even longer since I was 19!) so I was a little unsure if I could carry the look off, but I went with it anyway 😉

I thought the ideas to go with were: black dress, pearl necklace, high bun, tiara, black gloves.

A visit to the Op Shop found a black top and skirt for $5 each. Gloves came from a discount store. They aren’t gorgeous long gloves that Audrey would have worn, but they did the job. I added a blingy ring for some extra sparkle. A small tiara also came from a discount store. I love it, and might have to find somewhere else I can wear it…perhaps just around the house will do….!!

I had 2 strands of glass pearls which I easily made up into a double strand necklace. They weren’t long enough to go all the way around my neck, so I attached some black ribbon and tied it in bow at the back. Audrey wore a 3 strand pearl and diamente necklace with a diamente feature in the movie, but as I said, I’m going for the essence of her character. I borrowed some blingy clip-on earrings from my mum to complete the jewellery look.

As for the gorgeous high bun she wore, well, at the moment my hair is only just shoulder length so there was no way I could do that myself. I could have gone with the big hat and sunglasses look, but the party was at night and I didn’t think that would work. So I did some Googling and discovered that you can get clip-on buns. So I ordered one from eBay and hoped it would arrive in time, would be a good colour, and would work. I got two out of three. The colour didn’t match my hair very well, but I could live with that. A thousand bobby pins later, lots of hairspray, and I was good to go!

These terrible photos were taken just before we left for the party on my phone with little lighting, so apologies for the graininess. But you get the idea…

We had spent the earlier part of the day helping to set up the party, and it was absolutely gorgeous! The decorations were all in silver and black, with lots of twinkly lights. There were some blue lights included, and they looked beautiful too. Here is a small glimpse – the first two I took as we were setting up, the second two were taken by someone else at the party. It looked magical:

You may have heard about the terrible weather we have experienced lately in Sydney, and up the east coast of New South Wales. On party night we had everything – lightning, thunder, rain and hail. But no-one cared!

I should add that there were 2 other Audreys at the party, we all looked different, but all looked good. In fact, everyone went to great lengths to dress up and there were some very interesting characters!

What’s the best dress-up party you’ve been to?