Elle Belle is turning 1 in a few weeks. Naturally, her birthday party will be a significant celebration – one that we’ve been probably thinking about since she was born. We wanted to create custom invites that were original, fun, and didn’t cost a fortune so we decided that with a little work, we could get them done ourselves.
The idea of the photo of her with the balloon just kind of came to us. We love these over-size balloons! You can buy the tassel and balloon set on Etsy, but as it turns out, most craft and party stores carry these 36″ balloons as well. We took the photo on the west side highway, causing a little bit of a scene as I jumped up and down to get Ellery’s attention while Maciej snapped away.
Maciej designed the front and back of the invite. The cursive pink font is called Thirsty Rough, which you can buy here. It is kind of pricey but the font is so beautiful and Maciej will use it for his graphic design business so it was worth the investment. A nice free alternative is Marketing Script.The font for the main text is called Lato Light, but really any crisp sans serif will do. You can find the final Photoshop files here (front) and here (back).
Pink and gold will be the color scheme at her party so we purchased pink and gold A6-sized envelopes to be consistent. Paper Presentationin NYC carries a huge assortment of papers, envelopes, etc. or you can find numerous retailers online that sell similar products. Paper Presentation also sells wrap around address labels available in packs of 5 with 5 per sheet. Paper Presentation also provided a template to use for printing the labels, which we used to set up our Photoshop file.
Printing the labels was trial and error as each printer is a little different. The gold border made it hard to line up the labels exactly on the wrap around label stickers on each sheet. A few tries and some nudging up and down in photoshop got us a close as we could get. Smudge Ink, a local print shop in the West Village, printed our cards for us on 100 lb. stock. About $50 for 30 prints. This was much cheaper than what some of the print shops offered – Paper Presentation $90 for 25 cards or $110 for 50 cards and FedEx Kinkos was around $3 per card. Furthermore, neither option offered the heavy card stock we wanted so this made the decision easy!
