I did invitations for my best friend's baby shower. The theme was a sports theme (her husband is a high school assistant football coach) and the colors were blue and brown. I printed the wording in both a solid and outlined varisty font alternating blue and brown where the text color where I saw fit. I used clip art pictures of different sports balls (soccer, baseball, football, basketball) as accents within the invite to break up the wording. The top of the invitation had the baby's initals and the wording "come celebrate the arrival of Charles and Jennifer's MVP....."
The evelopes were powder blue and I found sports theme stickers to use as evelope seals.
I used cream colored paper and the invite was tied onto a piece of brown cardstock just bigger than the invite with a brown and white stitched ribbon. She loved them.
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For my daughter's first b-day, she had a ladybug theme. I found some premade blank invites at Staples (the M line) that were red cardstock (4x8) with a vellum overlay. I did the wording in red, with ladybugs as accents dividing up the wording which was printed onthe vellum. On the cardstock itself, I got those white dots, like you would use for garage sale tags, colored them black, and stuck them under the vellum overlay onto the cardstock to represent the ladybug spots. The velleum sheet was then tied to the red cardstock with either a black gingham ribbon or red gingham ribbon.
The evelopes were red and I had small ladybug stickers to use as seals. Winding around the seal, was a dashed line "trail." On the front of the envelope coming away fron the reciepinent's address was another small ladybug sticker with a dot trail and the words "This little ladybug is flying with glee, because you're invited to a birthday party." at the bottom of the envelope.
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For each project, I used Microsoft Word. I would make the paper size match what my final paper size would be and then played around in there making adjustments as needed. I always print, first, on a regular sheet on paper. Once I have everything the way I like it, i then begin to run everythign through my printer one by one. I haven't been able to do a project yet that I can run off a batch. A little time consuming, but everything turns out okay that way.
Oh and as far as printing on the velleum, i found I had to tape the vellum I was printing on to a sheet of paper in order to run it through my printer. Also some rpinters, may smear the ink on velleum.
