a homemade birthday invitation

Last weekend I set aside some time to make up an invitation for my daughter Adelaide's upcoming third birthday party. Addie has been chattering on and on and on about her birthday for months now, but one of her ramblings that touched my heart is her desire to invite the birds outside our window to her party. With this she inspired me to make up a little bird birthday invitation and party.

With this inspiration, I drew up a quickly scribbled concept drawing. This little sketch was very rough, but I has happy with the shape of the birds which came from such a quick and loose drawing. I have learned from my partner Charles (who is a professional Concept Artist) that often, the most powerful images come from the quickest sketches. The more a drawing is replicated and pushed, it can become less free and compelling. So, I kept the rough little sketch tucked safely away until I had time to make something more of it.

When it was time, I scanned in my quick little drawing, and traced over it with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. This became my template with which to make up some little birds. I printed out a few of my bird line drawings. I printed a few of these little bird drawings out, and used them to cut out collage pieces for my birds. Using all sorts of scraps - fabric, paper, linen-backed wallpaper - I cut the shapes out using my template. I lightly glued all my little cut pieces to a piece of white paper, and when I was happy with the composition I scanned them into Adobe Photoshop, where I touched up any small details and sized the image.

Once my image was ready, I saved my photoshop file into a .tif and placed it in Illustrator. I do this because I despise working with typography in Photoshop - I find Illustrator is much better for this kind of work. In Illustrator I then made and added the 1, 2, 3 numbers and the copy, going back to slightly tweak the background image in Photoshop a couple of times until it worked out best for the space. The typefaces I used are Mrs. Eaves and Engravers.

Then, using my old (Canon Pixma iP4200) desktop printer, printed them out onto this wonderful heavy, linen-canvas paper which I had picked up on sale. Once printed, I trimmed them down using a sharp new xacto blade and metal ruler on a cutting mat, and rounded the corners using my corner rounder.

One thing that I have always been meaning to do for years is to make a thank you card at the same time as making other cards. It is so easy to just put them off (and never, ashamedly, get around to doing) but I am really happy that this time I just pushed myself to get some thank-you's done at the same time. It feels great to already have them, all ready to go!

When I showed Adelaide the finished cards, she kept hugging and kissing them! She loves these little cards so much, that she has been sleeping with them, too!

I really enjoy making things for my daughter - putting a little bit of myself and my love and time my time into handmade things for her. Such as yearly birthday party invitations - partly because I know that I will have them to save for her forever. She really doesn't need any other presents - this is my gift to her.