Thursday, July 15, 2010

My DIY Pinwheels To Top The Kid's Pencils

I wanted to add some more fun to the activity booklets I had made for the kids attending our reception, and decided to put pinwheels on top of the pencils I had bought for them. I think the pictures say it all as far as my process went.


I used some pretty thick double sided card stock. But I think thinner paper will work just as well.
Make sure your hole on your hole punch is smaller than the head on your pin. (see #7)
The (4) hole punches will go on the straight cut edge. Of course, you can also always skip the zigzagged side and just keep all lines straight. I just did the zigzag for an added pizazz.


I actually ended up gluing the four pieces together.....putting a dab of glue stick around each hole as I folded each down..........then held in place for a few moments......


I know the pencil doesn't exactly match up with the paper that well (pencil is actually dark purple, but looks brown in pics) but that's ok. It just makes it all that more fun! =)
I also need to concoct a way to make 2 of these pinwheel pencils without actual pins for our two smaller kids. All the rest of the kids are over 10. I'm working on it!
And here it is with the activity booklet and the pillow box I made for the crayons. The pillow box actually just started off as an experiment. I was originally going to just tie some crayons together with ribbon, but then thought that I wanted to put them in some sort of container instead. I tried a few different things, then when I began the pillow box, there was no stopping me. I made them all without a single pic being taken. =(
But I'll make one more for tutorial sake.....soon.
I love the way all the papers match.
I'm still trying to think of some more ideas for the kids. Any thoughts?

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

My DIY Kid's Booklet

I decided to make just a small kid's booklet for the children that will be at my reception. If all that were invited come, there will be a total of twelve. I started by scouring the internet for templates of coloring and activity pages (wedding related). So I Googled "kids wedding activity book" under images. So I copy and pasted 4 coloring pages and 3 activity pages. On my own, I also created a word scramble with the theme of things you might find at our sweets table, along with another 2 pages of "how many four letter words and higher can you make from the words "PETER AND BELINDA". I put 2 pages per sheet to be printed out, then used my handy dandy cutter to trim them down to the size I needed. (4 x 8)
The picture above is a bit blurry.....but you get the idea.
I then stapled the 10 pages together.
Next, I got the photo cards from SeeHere.com I had made last year......there was a freebie special going on at the time, and I was thinking ahead. lol This is to be our cover for the booklets.
In fact....if you're interested in getting 25 free photo cards from them, they are running a special right now, and all you have to do is pay for shipping. You get (25) 4" x 8" cards in whatever design you choose, to be used for whatever you would like. Just enter this coupon code at checkout: cards-36. This special ends on 7/17/10.
So anyways.....I hot glue gunned the cover to the stack of papers by putting a thin line along the top..........
.......and there you have it! A little time consuming, but it basically cost me nothing but time. (Last year they even paid for shipping on photo cards!) =p

On another subject...........
I sent my invites out in 2 batches......one batch on Thursday and one batch on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't take pics of my assembly process as I was in SUCH a big hurry to get them out. As I may have mentioned in another post, I've been so busy with Etsy, that time just flew right by me. I wanted to get them out really early so that when the response deadline came up, I could call the people I hadn't heard from to get the count. Then, send out more invites for any open spaces I might have. You see, because of budget AND reception space we had to cut our guest list WAY down low, so I figured whoever couldn't make it on our first wave of invites, maybe people from a second wave could. Make sense? Well anyways....I'll try and take pictures and share from my second wave. How's that?
Did you or do you plan to do anything similar?