Since we are having my daughter’s upcoming birthday party at the local zoo, I needed some cute zoo themed birthday party invitations to send out. I shopped around online to see if anything struck my fancy or inspired me but didn’t find anything that was just right. I usually end up making my invitations anyway so I decided that this time would not be an exception! What a perfect time to use my Animal Kingdom Cricut cartridge to come up with a design of my own! If you remember, I had just used the same cartridge to make decorations for the frozen banana treats that I plan to serve as well. I can see a theme here!

I made a lot of prototypes before settling on my final design. I tried making the normal opening card, I tried doing something where there wasn’t a background at all (just a cut out shape), and I tried folding an invite into an interesting shape — all just not quite right. I finally settled on making the cut-out animal the invitation and having it live inside a cage.

Once I decided on the look I wanted, it took a little more trial-and-error to come up with the final design. I learned where not to put glue if you want to actually remove the animal from the cage and that the googly eyes are slightly thicker than paper so the cage top needed to be slightly elevated. Makes complete sense to me…now! Now, when the recipient pulls the animal out, all of the party information is written on the back. Here’s a photograph of all the parts I used to create one of the invites:

Take a look at all of my finished designs, which are ready to go in the mail. For me, the googly eyes are my favorite touch. You could try adding larger eyes to make the animals more comical looking if you like.