Little Boy Baby Shower Invitations!
This past couple of weeks I designed and created baby shower invitations with one of my friends for her daughter-in-law's baby shower. Everyone shares their adorable projects, but this time, I'd like to share with you a little bit of my process of developing a card. Despite how easy it looks, there is often quite a bit of playing with products to develop a final pleasing design. I told my friends if its not "OMG that's cute!" then I'm not happy with it.
The thinking...
- they are expecting a boy, so I was thinking trucks and cars.
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for 40 cards, having enough paper is important. I had a pack of Outdoor Denim and Pear cardstock, and a lot of the Later Sk8r B&T paper. I decided that the Later Sk8r design is too old-ish for a newborn, so I combined it with Die Cuts with a View (DCWV) papers in the Baby Boy Stack.
- I checked with the mom-to-be and she wanted the colors to be Navy and almost Lime Green and she was thinking cars and trucks. So we started out on the same wavelength.
- perusing Pinterest for a couple of designs helped in my design concepts
First Sample
I had such a great time using the Later Sk8r papers and stamps last year that I thought I would start with die-cut gears using the Artiste Cricut cartridge. My first attempt used Outdoor Denim for the card enclosure and Later Sk8r paper as a pullout with a gear on top (Artiste).
I cut the Baby Boy lettering using Plantin Schoolbook, using patterned paper and backed it with White Daisy cardstock. I heat embossed a farm truck from the Fast and Furious stamp set and fussycut it. And I used a gear cut using the Artiste cartridge.
Because I was just playing with examples, I wasn't putting the elements down especially carefully, but even if they were perfect, turns out that I didn't care for the results at all. The pullout card was not wide enough for the enclosure and if I made it any wider, it would be too tall to fit in a standard envelope.
For my second attempt, I stamped and heat embossed the farm truck. You can see that I lightly stamped the Fast and Furious tire track under the ribbon. I used a non-CTMH sentiment, which I am embossed with white embossing powder.
The gears were cut from Outdoor Denim and Later Sk8r on my Cricut with the Artiste cartridge.
Again, I was not satisfied with the result.
On my third attempt, I tried to isolate another Fast and Furious truck and the tire tread in a frame by stamping on White Daisy, which I layered on Outdoor Denim.
I cut an arrow from the Artbooking Cricut cartridge and used a steel tread dry-embossing folder on Pear backed on Outdoor Denim. Even with the cute little gears again, I still did not like this card. It was a "No go!"
Why was this so difficult? I needed some mojo!
Design #4 - I layered the background with the same DCWV paper. I tried stacking the cars and trucks.
They looked pretty good with heat-embossing, but the left side of the card didn't work out. I didn't have any stamps that would fit, and the shower invitation wording was on the inside.
Try #5 - I did like the steelplate tread look. So I tried it vertically.
I made a little tag using the Artiste Cartridge and the gear tag. The sentiment was stamped with Outdoor Denim ink and heat-embossed with detailed Clear embossing powder.
I stamped the truck and then fussy-cut it and laid it on top of large gear in Later Sk8r B&T.
Better, but still not great...maybe too frilly for a boy card.
6th Attempt
Moving along - at last I was starting to get into it. I mixed 2 of the papers from the Baby Boy Stack, and used large white ric-rack where the edges met. A large gear cut from Outdoor Denim using Artiste made a good layer. The truck was heat-embossed on White Daisy and fussy cut. I used Versamark ink and a non-CTMH powder.
The 7th attempt was closest....it uses a lot of the same elements, layered on Outdoor Denim, and the Boy stack paper, along with the steeltread. I finally got the tire tread in there. But I didn't like the truck embossed in that color of blue, and it didn't go well with the lime green on the bottom.
Thanks for looking at my "failures". I hope it helps in understanding that an adorable card doesn't happen the first time. For me, the development of the design is half the fun. The non-perfect examples were part of getting to a really cute invitation design, and we made 40+ invitations shortly after.
THE NEXT POST WILL REVEAL THE FINAL DESIGN!
We stamped the truck (Fast and Furious set) in Outdoor Denim ink, heat-embossed them with clear powder, and I fussy-cut them. Then Grandma stamped the tire tread in Outdoor Denim ink on the patterned paper. We heat-embossed "shower" in Outdoor Denim also using clear embossing powder. In the meantime, I dry-embossed the pear cardstock with a steel plate embossing folder and trimmed them to size. We cut the baby boy from Outdoor Denim cardstock on the Cricut. 
