This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.
A great theme party starts with a great themed invitation!
We always do fun, themed invitations for my kiddos' birthday parties--check out the message in a bottle invitation to the pirate-themed birthday party and the giant Minecraft block invitation to the Minecraft-themed party.
This year, my soon-to-be eleven-year-old is having a fairy tale-themed birthday party, so we made each invitee a party invitation in the shape of a royal scroll. It was easy to do, used mostly stash, and was a great way to introduce the party's theme to all the little guests.
Here's how we did it!
1. Obtain a couple of thin dowels. Because this was a royal decree, the kid wants the scroll handles to look nice and finished, so she vetoes my suggestion that we use twigs found in the yard. I maintain that twigs would look adorable, however--perhaps for a woodland fairy party? Dowels are sold in several widths--we chose the narrowest, for these small scrolls, but you could just as easily obtain one wide enough for the largest scroll that you could handle.
2. Paint the dowels. The kid claims that a royal scroll would obviously have gold handles, so I leave her to it. Unfinished wood takes paint easily, so she is able to make the dowels beautifully gold with two coats of paint.
3. Compose and design the text of the scrolls. Because I am a mad genius, I compose an invitation in poem form, with an ABCB rhyme scheme. My shining moment is when I am able to rhyme a request for an RSVP with my email address. You'd think this would encourage people to actually RSVP, but be assured--it doesn't.
My husband lays the poem out in fancy font, with two invitations to a page. My kiddo reminds him that the invitation should be long, so that you have to unscroll it to read it, and so he indulges her by leaving a little more space between stanzas. If she ever gets married, she's going to spend a LOT of time planning her wedding.
An optional next step would be to coffee stain these scrolls to make them look aged.
4. Cut the dowels to size. The scroll handles should be longer than the scroll, so the kid measures them out at a couple of inches past the scroll on each side, and makes sure that they are even:
My older kid has just finished earning her Woodworker badge in Girl Scouts, and so she delights in "offering assistance to a younger Scout," as she puts it, by cutting the dowels to size:
5. Attach the scroll to the handles. There are several ways that one could do this--pretty washi tape, double-sided tape, hot glue--but I'm stoked that the children have taken over the project, and so I hand them the simplest solution, Scotch tape, and move on with my life:
Super cute, right? Also in the planning stages are games of Pin the Kiss on the Frog Prince and Toilet Paper Princess (I'm banking that most of the young guests have never been to a bridal shower before; they are going to flip OUT over this game!), sandwiches cut into the shapes of crowns and ponies, and the ubiquitous castle cake.
That castle cake, by the way, is going to need all of your positive intentions sent my way!
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