Party invitations

Well phew, so that's all over and Hazel's off at her first day of school. Talk about cramming it all into one weekend plus the farewell at créche on Friday (which reduced me to tears if not Hazel!).  I've been battling sciatica as a result of a slipped lumbar disk too, so sitting hasn't been all that fun for the last couple weeks - nor has anything much! Ladies, Do. Your. Abdominal. Exercises. after your baby is born, let me and my lack of muscles be a dire warning to you.  Here I am 5 years later paying the price for my laziness and procrastination.

After a lot of mind-changing Hazel had settled on an animal 'theme' for her birthday - I use that term loosely as the only thing animal about it, other than the behaviour of the kids which was distinctly feral at times, was the invitation and the suggestion that the invitee should dress as their favourite animal. That actually got them incredibly excited and there was a lot of "Hazel's mum, Hazel's mum! Guess what costume I'm going to be wearing to her party!" when I picked her up on créche days. As it turns out, princesses are a kind of animal - did you know that?

The invitation got a lot of compliments and I was pretty pleased with how it all went so I thought I'd share it with you - and make the photograph available for people to download if anyone else has a small party animal to plan for.  Click on it to go through to Flickr and then Actions/All Sizes/Download (original size)

It's simply a photo of some of Hazel's Schleich animals that has been Photoshopped till it begged for mercy and then Mat found some appropriate clip art to finish it off.  Hazel thought the photo corners were hilarious but they made me miss real photo albums and the process of putting photos in and licking the corners. Well ok, so I've never really done that on a large scale, seeing as plastic photo pockets had been invented by the time I got my own camera and albums! But you know, my parent's albums and my baby photos (in black and white!) look pretty classy with the photo corners. Besides, I've had a packet of them lurking around for years so I was pleased to get to use them!

I printed off the photos myself (3 per page) so they would fit on the front of half a sheet of A4 paper folded in half - whatever measurement that is, with the text printed on the inside. Pretty easy to set up on Word or in Photoshop and print off yourself.