Make Your Own Invitations for a Pirate Treasure Hunt

We broke these invitations into small steps on the to do timeline, so that when the time came to actually make them, we knew exactly what to do and it went quickly and easily.  

Toward the beginning of this party's timeline, we brainstormed pirate invites.  Around this time, Sarita was planning a treasure hunt as a summer activity for the girls, so we talked about making the invites look like a treasure map.

The next invitation to do came a few weeks later, when we planned out the invite.  Again, I only spent around 15 minutes on this.  I simply googled pirate invitations, saved some images and invitation wording that I liked, and sketched out a mock up in my party planning book.

A few weeks later, we gathered our supplies.  As I mentioned in that post, I like to use supplies I already have and solicit the rest from friends and family in an effort to help them declutter.  I'm a great friend!

Finally, it was time to make the invitations.  I usually break the actual invitation making step into 2 to do steps/nights, not including addressing and delivering them (that's it's own step).  The first night I created the invite using word.  This didn't take long because I had already brainstormed and planned how I wanted these to look and what wording I might use.  

I did run into a glitch that some of you might benefit from knowing about.  When I went to print, I realized that my laptop was set to print remotely to the office, so I needed to print it from my husband's computer.  When I pulled the word document up on his laptop, the font had changed because he had an older version of word.  He didn't have a similar font I liked, so I was stuck.

But, luckily for me, I am invincible and quickly came up with the brilliant plan to save the invite as a pdf using acrobat reader on my computer and THEN email it to the other laptop.  This may be completely old news to you techies, but for me, it opened up a whole new world of possibilities!  For those of you who are even less techno geek than me, Acrobat Reader can be downloaded for free and is probably already on your computer if you open a lot of downloads you get.  Many of them are saved in AR, and now I know why!

Because of this glitch, the first session took about 30 minutes, instead of 15.  Luckily, my sister was there to help tear and stamp the edges with me to help the process along.  While we printed and tore, we also tried to tea stain the invites as we had originally planned.  This too turned out to be a disaster when the wording started to run all over the page, so we ditched that idea and used a brown stamp all over to create the same effect without the mess.

The next week, we sealed the invites with our wax seal.  I never found a K or an A seal, and didn't want to purchase one just for the invitations, so we used a bead to seal them.  It turned out fine, unless you have a scary imagination- in which case the seal may appear a bit like a bloody thumb print.

No- it's NOT a bloody thumb print

This is a messy process: keep down paper and be careful not to burn yourself!  We ended up using an older wax seal to hold the bead for us, so we could stop burning the tips of out fingers off each time.

So, this week I am addressing them, and next week I will deliver.  With these kinds of invitations, I will hand deliver most.  A few will go to friends and family out of town, so I will carefully stuff them into envelopes to mail.  This is why I usually give myself one week to address them, and one week to actually mail them.  This gives me 30 minutes total to hand deliver or get to the post office.

The whole invitation process was 6 steps.  By breaking it into steps over several weeks, things go more smoothly.  If I had tried to do all this in one day, I would have gotten frustrated by all the things that went wrong and given up or been unhappy with the final project.  

Do yourself a favor- plan your parties in 15 minutes.