Party inviations. Making Something cheap look not so cheap.

So as I have said before I'm planning a 16th birthday party for the princess, and we decided that she should go with zebra print and pink. The most over done party theme of the year, yes I know. Actually after some debate and deliberation we decide to go with zebra and turquoise to change things up a bit and to be a little less cliche. After some searching and price comparisons we decided that Walmart had the best prices on invitations plates napkins etc.

Step two in any great party, after choosing a theme is invitations. These were $0.98 for a package of 8 which happened to be the number we needed. Perfect!

Invitations before. Before crafty mom (that's me) decided that she was not going to send out these cheap looking things out, not even to teenagers.  So the first step was to find a border, so I yahoo searched zebra border and this is what I found. At this point in time we were still going with pink. And wouldn't you know it I cant find the link to the border I used.

OK with border found and downloaded next step was to re size and format the inserts. This took a little time. I measured the invitations and discovered that they are slightly smaller than a 4x6 note card. Again perfect because I just so happened to have not only one but two packages of blank note card. Ha. I used the Microsoft works word processor for the next steps. Which I'm not going into unless someone requests it. Some double stick tape and.....

voila this is what the finished product looks like.  Now let me tell you what I did wrong. I'm so self critical. The invitation its self was formatted in portrait but I made the inserts in landscape, I didn't realize the error until I had printed out 16 cards.  I forgot to put Saturday before the date. Ive already had one kid ask me if it was on a Monday. And I wasn't clear on what water games were. In this case its water balloons. I have had every kid that was invited ask "whats water games?"

Oh and BTW this is an original idea that came straight from my noggin and not pinterest or another blog, yay me. You should be proud!! Feel free to copy the idea, I don't mind.