Easy Baby Shower Invitations

I'm hosting a baby shower for a friend in the next few weeks and I created these simple invitations.  My husband works for Adobe so I wish I could say I used Photoshop or that I even know how to use Photoshop, but no.  For the life of me I cannot figure it out.  So, I used Word.  And you know what, they turned out pretty cute!  I'm inviting an insane amount of people to this shower (over 100 invites) so I needed to be able to fit as many on a page as possible while still keeping it simple and beautiful.  Here's how I created these easy baby shower invites.

1.  In a blank word document, change the orientation to landscape.

2.  Insert a shape.  I figured I could do three invitations on a page, so I inserted three rectangles of the same size.

3. I downloaded my background from www.graphicstock.com where you can get a free 7 day trial.  You do have to input your credit card information so if you don't want to maintain the subscription just be sure to cancel it before the free period ends.  I chose "watercolor rain drop and clouds".  I am a bit obsessed with the look of watercolor right now and the blue rain clouds were a perfect background for a boy baby shower.

4. Leaving a border, I inserted another rectangle inside my original rectangle so I would have a space for my text.  I filled this inner rectangle in with white.

5. Then I found a simple umbrella clipart image through a google search and placed that at the top of my inner rectangle.  I did alter the color a bit of the umbrella by double clicking and formatting the picture.  Just recolor it to whatever suits your project best.

6. As far as the rest goes, I simply mixed and matched a few fonts in order to achieve the look I wanted.  I love using www.dafont.com when looking for the perfect font.  They are all free, with the option to donate to the creator, and there are some amazing fonts.  If you have never browsed that site you definitely need to! For this project I used, Wolf in the City, Champagne and Limousines and Dead Hardy.  All of which I have downloaded at some point from Dafont.com.

7. For printing purposes, make sure to change your file to a pdf!  There are doc to pdf converters online you can find, but the easiest way is to do it in word.  I had someone show me this trick a few years ago otherwise I NEVER would have known about it.  It's pretty hidden.  Anyway, click FILE then PRINT.  It will open up a little box and in the bottom left hand corner it will say PDF.  Click on that and one of the options will say SAVE AS PDF.  Then just go through the process of saving it.  Seriously, so easy, but if you don't know where to look it can be frustrating.
I'm having mine printed at Office Depot and I originally uploaded my file in docx format and it had changed all my fonts and nothing looked right so I started to panic until I realized that I just needed to alter it to a pdf format.  So make sure to not skip that step!

I'm having roughly 35(!) pages printed and trimmed in thirds so I can pass them out to the women invited to the shower.  They are all women in my neighborhood so I'm simply going to staple a rubber band to the corner and attach them to the door knob (a common way to pass things out in my neighborhood).  Now I just need to make sure I make enough food for that many people!  Wish me luck!

Our Fixer Upper

I remember walking through our house for the first time.  It looked AMAZING on the MLS.  Clearly they only posted the very best pictures.  Everything looked decent enough, maybe a little dated but I still loved it.  The listing never showed the bathrooms, for good reason.  They seemed like the worst part of the whole house (ha!  If we only really knew!).  But they were usable, so we could renovate them later on.  And the view!  Our house seriously has an amazing view.  We are up in the foothills so our neighbors are down the hill from us and there is scrub oak between our properties so it is extremely private.  Even in the winter.  Ok, the yard was pretty bad too, but nothing a good mowing and probably a new lawn in the back couldn't fix.  After getting excited and imagining my new life there with our new baby (yes, I was 9 months pregnant, how's that for perfect timing) I was ready to jump on the house.  We got in the car and I said, "I love it!"  My husband was floored.  We had very different experiences with the walk through.  He said the entire time he was just keeping a running list of everything that would need to be fixed.  I think the only thing that saved it was the view.  We both loved it.

We bought our house in June of 2013, closing two weeks after we had our daughter, June (yes, her name is June and she was born in June.  We get it).

 

The renovations began immediately.  We lived in a rental and needed to be out and into our house as quickly as possible.  Unfortunately during the inspection phase there ended up being quite a few things that needed to be remedied before we could move in.  There was mold in the basement, we had termites, and we wanted to redo our kitchen cabinets while we weren't living in the house yet.  So much to do and only about a month to do it!  Randal would go to work early then go straight from work over to the house to do more work and then come home around 11pm or midnight, sometimes later.

Mold remediation

Randal couldn't come back for lunch but he managed to find a pot, a can of spaghetti sauce, noodles and a fork at the new house.  It's the little things, you know?

He was exhausted; I was exhausted.  I had a newborn to take care of and I packed our rental home up.  When I wasn't doing that, June and I would head over to the house to paint and clean and get things ready for the move.  It was so much work.  Oh, and if that wasn't enough.  We also decided to reno our kitchen just about a week or so before we were set to move in.  It had a false ceiling (fur down? fir down?) that went down to the top of our cabinets, so probably 15".  Then in the center of the kitchen it opened back up and had mirrored tiles and a light fixture.  I know what you're thinking, "Mirrored tiles AND an outdated light fixture?  But it sounds so beautiful!".  We knew we wanted to get rid of it someday but after putting in so much work, the last thing Randal wanted to do was start another project that could delay our move in.  Well his dad was over helping and he made the point that if we didn't do it now then we never would.  You wouldn't want to live in that intense of a construction zone.  So they opened it up.  And it RAINED insulation.  It was everywhere.  Our house is so dusty and I honestly think it goes back to all the renovations we did and keep doing.  Anyway, they brought the ceiling up so it was flush with the rest of the house and now it is hard to imagine it ever being so low.  Those were the biggest projects we tackled before our house was livable, but we moved in and the work didn't slow down, we just had to live around it.  If you have ever lived through a reno, you know how awful that truly is.

Starting

I've been wanting to start a blog for a long time but it has always seemed so overwhelming.  My husband and I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and she just made it sound so simple.  You just start.  She made it a goal and she just did it.  So this is me, doing it.  I'm not planning on having many (if any!) readers, but I am excited to have my own little space on the internet.  Going along with Gretchen's book, my husband and I have started our own happiness projects and this is one of my goals.  Figure out what makes you happy and do it.  I am fascinated by tutorials and projects.  I love projects so I want to expand on that and savor the process more through blogging.  So, if you happened to stumble on this simple blog, welcome!  And if no one but myself is reading it, well, I'm at least fulfilling a goal ha.

Our home during the construction phase. Circa 1976.