I’ve been wanting to use these paper mache book boxes for a long time as party invitations. My opportunity arose when I decided to have a Halloween party for my daughter and her friends. Since they are all about 3-6 years old, I didn’t want to have a truly scary Halloween party. With the book boxes in my mind, I came up with doing A Storybook Halloween Party as my theme. Over the next couple of months, I will share with you all of my party throwing ideas and pictures. But first things first…the invitation.
First, I thought about paper macheing black tissue paper all over the box and then adding embellishments on top of that but after destroying my first box, I decided that was far too time consuming and messy. So instead, I opted to paint the areas of the box that would not be covered by other embellishments. Paint the edges of the box white where the paper would be. The brush strokes will make it look like pages.
While the paint was drying, I booted up the old laptop and started searching for some images to use. I found cover art from some of my daughter’s favorite Halloween books. I simply printed them out to cut up and use on my book.
Download this image file to use all the same book covers I did. Please be aware that these are copyrighted images and therefore should not be reproduced for commercial use. Kids Halloween book cover images.
Once you have your images printed, arrange them all over the front, back and inside of your book. There’s no set way to do this, you just have to mix and match all of the images until you get an arrangement that you like.
For the actual party information part, I decided to use a metallic Sharpie to write the date, time, place on the binding of the book. This is a neat effect, making it look more like a “real” book.
Now, you are probably wondering, what to put inside the book? For me, I am going to include some Halloween candy, treats and miniature Halloween books. You can put anything you like in here. You could even put a small costume (think pirate patch, bunny ears, tiaras, etc.) or some face paints. The possibilities are endless.
The invitation has set the party mood so next I will need to think of some appropriate decorations, games and food. Please comment here if you have any ideas for me!
5 comments so far:
Hi! I was quite impressed with the invitation. I too am looking for ways in making unique invitations for halloween on a limited budget. There are about 25 kids and 75 adults expected to join our annual party this year. Last year, i created a ghost invitation. I used a lollipop and wrapped a white tissue paper around it and stringed a card to it. It was pretty basic. I want to come up with something more unique this time. Any ideas? But I am surely going to mark this page. I might use your idea in some other party. Thanks again!
Karina, that is a lot of invites you will have to do so I am sure you want it to be inexpensive and easy to replicate. I thought of basing my invitations on the Ouija board. You could decoupage a print-out of the board on one side of a postcard sized piece of wood and then have your party information on the other. Or, you could make a collage of pictures from the party that you had last year and print out your invitations at a place like Shutterfly.com. I’ve done this for a couple of other parties where I had to do a lot of invitations. People like to see pictures from the previous year. One final thought is to send pumpkin, haunted house or witch decorating “kits” to the guests. These kits would include a foam form with the foam pieces to decorate. Kids love getting a craft project in the mail to do. Good luck and please share your final design with us in our Flickr pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/chicaandjo/
WoW! Thanks so much for the speedy reply. Will definitely let you know how the invites and party turns out.I definitely like the ouija board invitation, but i’ll have to see the materials available (and price) in our area (am writing from the Philippines). I’ll try to make a website about it for you to view or if that wasnt possible, i’ll email you pictures. You are absolutely correct, am trying to find a way to minimize costs. Hope all of our parties turn great!
Karina, I did a Google search and there are Ouija board images online that you could print out for your invites. Finding inexpensive wood to put them on might be a problem. If it is, you could always used cardboard instead. Paint the cardboard black and then mount the Ouija board picture on one side and a piece of white paper on the other to give your party details. Also, my good friend travels to the Philippines frequently (Cebu) for her job. She has had a great time visiting there.
I think I’ve got the perfect wood solution for the Ouija board idea — lauan plywood. It’s about 1/4″ thick, very lightweight, and very smooth. It comes in large sheets (usually 4′x8′) and should be available at any decent hardware store. A few trips through a table saw and you can turn that big piece into a pile of little pieces for your Ouija boards. If you figure out the size you want the boards to be before you go shopping, you might even be able to get the hardware store folks to cut it for you.