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!