Bug's First Birthday

This was a fun little (or not so little) project.  I was asked to design my grandson's first birthday invitation.  I was told it was going to be a "bug" birthday as our pet name for him is "Bug".  I began by checking Pinterest as it always has some great ideas.  After much searching I decided to put my own spin on a few different ones that I had seen.

I started out by looking for a nice verse to print onto the front of the invitation.  To do that, I put my 200gsm paper into landscape orientation and typed in the wording I wanted on the right and left of the paper.  I knew what the measurement of the front needed to be so I just played around with the verse moving it up and down and across until I was happy with the placement.  I printed 13 pages of these so I ended up with 26 verses.  I cut the paper down to 5 inches by 6 1/4 inches.  At that point I also measured a backing piece which I wanted to be green.  The measurements of that piece are 5 3/16 x 6 5/16.  

  

Next I stamped the sun and clouds onto some appropriately coloured scrap paper.  The sun and clouds are from a set by Simon Says Stamp called Happy Day.  I then die cut them with the coordinating die cuts.  The coloured parts are just me trying to decide whether to give them rosy cheeks or not.  

I also die cut some leaves from the Botanical Builder Framelits and stamped the veins using the Botanical Blooms stamp set.  I coloured the cheeks of the sun and clouds using my prismacolor pencil "Process Red" and my Odourless Solvent and paper stump to blend.

I stamped the number 1 from the Number of Years Stamp Set  using Baked Brown Sugar ink (I believe this is discontinued but you could substitute Soft Suede or Crumb Cake/Tip Top Taupe instead).  Once I had placed the number one, I used a stamp set from Penny Black called "So Lucky" to stamp the grass using Cucumber Crush ink.  When stamping the grass, just put ink on the first part of the grass and stamp along at varying heights until you get to the end where you can stamp the whole stamp to fill right to the border.

Next I glued the paper onto the backing card and used my scallop circle punch to "chomp" bits out of the card  to make it look like something was eating it.  I also got my "ant" stamp from a set called "Bugs and Kisses" from Stampin'Up! and stamped my ants randomly across the bottom with one crawling up the number one.  

I glued the leaves onto the number 1 so it now looks like a bit of a tree.  I stamped the bugs from a set simply called "Bugs" from Kaszazz and coloured using the stampin write markers.   

 




I used my stampin dimensionals to pop up the sun and the cloud.  I think they look freakin cute as.

At this point I thought it was still lacking a little something so I found another little bee from the Touches of Texture stamp set and decided to stamp him into the empty space in the centre.

I'll use a stamp on the back to give the date time and place etc.  Check out the youtube video for full instructions.