Jon's family has a family reunion every two years, which means this summer is the reunion. Along with her cards, Jon's mom asked if I could make little informal invitations to include with her Christmas cards to let everyone know when the reunion is. I don't do much as far as invitations go, but I thought this would be fun.
After putting it off for so long, and having already finished the Christmas cards, (I was going to give her everything at once), I figured I should probably do the invites. I wanted something simple and not too bulky since she was mailing all of these out to everyone, so I went to Microsoft Word and looked through their free templates. I chose the family reunion ones with a tree on the front, and customized their template a little to make something totally unique (and a lot more work than it needed to be).
This is going to be a photo heavy tutorial showing you where I got the template from and how I altered it to get my finished product.
These are really hard to read, but you open MS Word, and click on new. This is what it shows you. Cick on the group labelled Invitations.
It gives you a bunch of different categories, click on Event Invitations (or the folder that fits your needs).
At the very bottom is the family reunion invites with the tree. There's two files you need to 'download' to make their complete card (the front and the inside; they're labelled accordingly). Double click or click download to download your file. It should open on its own afterwards.
When you open the front side which you would have just downloaded, it looks like this. This layout is fine if you plan to print them off, cut them and fold them in half to make a card you'd open, but I didn't want that.
Next I downloaded the inside template for the card. I downloaded it simply because it was divided exactly the same way as the front, and it was easier to alter that than try and make my own document that would line up appropriately.
This is what the inside of the template looks like. The bottom two squares are where you would put all your information if you were making a card you folded.
Going back to the front template, I copied and pasted the photo on the top two quadrants and used a downloaded font. I created a text box on top of the image to allow me to move it where I wanted it without fighting with it too much (which was great because I moved it a lot).
Going back to the back of the card, this required a lot more work because I was basically working from scratch. I created a text box for the words (again to make it easier to move around) and used the picture from the original template (the little one that would have been on the back of the card), and put it into the corner.
I printed them numerous times on regular printer paper to make sure everything lined up accordingly (a few hours of work), and once everything lined up how I wanted it, I printed them double sided onto plain white cardstock and cut them out.
Here's the front. It's really simple, but it's definitely not boring. The font used for this side of the card is called
Pea Jenny Script. (click the name to download the font).
Here's the back. I never thought to print out one without any information on the back, so I used the "A Beautiful Mess" app and blocked out the information. The font for the back of the card was another downloaded one called
Throw My Hands Up in the Air. (click the name to download the font).
That's a wrap. I'm so excited for this reunion, this time I should actually remember everyone's names! Wish me luck!
Have a wonderful day everyone!
-Alex
