The Surprises That Await You!!

Our middle child decided for her birthday this year (well...next year as her birthday is right after Christmas) she wanted a Willy Wonka themed birthday. My mind saw:

Mmm...candy...where was I? Oh! Yes, back to this party theme. As moms or event planners know, the invitation sets your theme so I decided what better than a Golden Ticket! I surfed the internet in search of one I could copy and make my own. The ones made by others are either too expensive or BLAH!!

You'd think this would be an easy task right? It wasn't.  I searched days  for one I could "alter" to fit my purposes. Finally I just found a Golden Ticket whose basic shape was what I was looking for and...well, I am not going to go on about de-colorizing...blah, blah, blah. Let's just say...it took some time. ;)

So I decided, rather than hide how to do this, I am going to share how I did it, add a link to the images and you can save them so NO other Mom out there need to go through the complete frustration of buying or creating their own from scratch. You'll just have to right click and save the images.

Here is the link to pictures: http://photobucket.com/wonkainvitations

The blank "ticket" is what I used as the base. Then used Photoscape to add text (which I included in case you'd like to use similar wording). Finally printed out on "gold" shimmer paper that I found at Michael's Craft Store (4 sheets for $1). Despite the clerk's adamant exclamation that I could not print on that type of scrapbook paper...I did! :p And with my crappy little HP printer too, thank you very much!  My advice is: 1.Make sure you print one page at a time and remove each page to fully dry before printing another and 2. Make sure the tray on the print is open or don't get distracted by a 4 yr old. Yeah..I think just opening the tray is a safer option too. :) The ink will smear if not given proper drying time, which is only a couple hours but I waited 24 to be safe.

Good luck and let me know if you used this and how it worked out for you!