How to make your own custom printables

**If you missed yesterday's post, there's a fabulous giveaway going on here this week- just go to THIS POST to enter!**

Hello friends! Today's post is all about how to make your own customized printables for birthday parties, baby/wedding showers, teacher gifts, Tony Awards viewing parties, Mad Men season finale parties, ......you get the picture. As most of you know, I do NOT consider myself to be very tech savvy, so the fact that I was able to do this means that anyone could do this. You actually may already know some great tips/tricks on this subject, but I'm going to share how I made the printables for the girls Wizard of Oz party because fabric, yes fabric, was involved.

Chew on that for a sec...

Since Dorothy's dress is blue/white gingham, I knew I wanted to use tons of it in the party decor. It served as the table cloth on the food table, and I also made a couple of banners with it as well as a dress-up apron for our photo props, but I still thought, that's just not enough. I need more gingham just like Christopher Walken needed more cowbell. (SNL anyone?) I wanted to somehow incorporate it into the tags on the favor baskets as well as the labels for the food, and that's where fabric.com comes in.

I went to their website, typed 'blue and white gingham' into the search bar, and BAM. Several fabric samples to choose from, just like that. I found one that would work, enlarged the sample picture, and right-clicked on it to save it to my computer. Once you've done that, you'll have a pic that looks like this:

which is great, but I didn't really want that ruler at the bottom.

Enter Picmonkey.com

(once again, this is not a sponsored post, but I should totally be on their payroll as I tend to mention them 128 times a week.

Just sayin.)

I uploaded that pic onto picmonkey's site, used the crop tool, said buh-bye to the ruler, and added an oval in the center to provide a perfect spot to add my text. I also faded the oval out a bit so the gingham was visible behind it as well.

Now all I had to do was add the text on top.

It's just.that.simple.

Once I added words, I printed each of them out on cardstock in whatever size I needed. I used the wallet-size option to print 9 favor tags per 8.5 x 11 sheet:

 

and also printed wallet-sized labels onto adhesive paper for the

cupcakes in a jar:

For the food labels, I printed a 5 x 5 pic, glued them to a piece of cardstock folded in half, and voila!

This works with any picture/graphic you have saved on your computer-

 for example-

I used this Batman graphic I found online (from a simple google image search) for the food labels, favor tags, and even the invites for O's party back in February:

and, just in case any of you are planning a Batman shindig anytime soon, here's a blank one in black and white:

 and a blank one in black and yellow:

** one last tip **

these blank templates can also be used as custom thank you notes! I printed the blank gingham cards in a 3 x 5 size, and now we have our own *free* thank you notes that match our party theme.

So tell me-

what do you plan to make first with picmonkey?

Custom labels for your office/craft supplies/tools/makeup?

Custom invites?

Monogrammed stationary?

Do tell...

Follow the yellow brick road

I'd like to once again thank the creators of Picmonkey for giving us an editing site that is so incredibly easy to use and reminiscent of its former counterpart which is now deceased and rhymed with Schmicnic.

Because of Picmonkey, I'm able to take this picture:

and turn it into this picture:

which is clearly more authentic since we all know the bricks were really yellow. Never mind that a few of our sidewalk bricks are especially dingy and look a little black. Just ignore those.

I took this pic of my girl on her birthday and it totally defines what she's into at the moment. I need to blow this up poster-size and frame it immediately.

Like, right now.

But this post isn't really about Picmonkey, although it is complete and total awesomesauce. It's about the fact that I am in party.planning.mode. In the party 'zone', if you will. I've made lists of things to make, lists of things to buy, lists of recipes to find, lists of things to sew. Hello, my name is Mary Kathryn and I'm a list maker. I am so stinkin excited about putting this party together that it's like having a Christmas in May. That's right. If you want to give me a present, just ask me to throw a themed party. Dina and I would totally be BFF's if we knew each other. Totally.

If you follow me on Pinterest, you've probably noticed that I've been pinning

Oz-ness like crazy. You can check out my party board HERE, but I wanted to share a few of my favorite ideas that I'm planning to use for the girls' party. And yes, that's plural because we'll be celebrating both our girlies at this party since they are both major Wizard of Oz fans at the moment, and they also happen to have birthdays 13 days apart.

I love the party favor baskets that Kate found at Michael's:

Source: mykidseatoffthefloor.blogspot.com via Mary Kathryn on Pinterest

(from my kids eat off the floor)

Love the yellow bulletin board paper turned yellow brick road for this party:

Source: catchmyparty.com via Mary Kathryn on Pinterest

(from catch my party)

Love these apple tree centerpieces I found on Kara's party ideas:

Source: karaspartyideas.blogspot.com via Mary Kathryn on Pinterest

Love these Louboutin's:

Source: weheartit.com via Mary Kathryn on Pinterest

Oh wait, how'd those get in there?

Back to the parties...

The absolute most spare-no-dime-on-the-party-and-send-all-the-guests-home-with-a-truckload-of-stuff would have to be this one:

Source: karaspartyideas.blogspot.com via Mary Kathryn on Pinterest

Not only is it beautifully styled, but each of the party guests went home with a Dorothy dress, a pair of ruby slippers, a stuffed lion, tinman, scarecrow, and Dorothy, a stuffed Toto in a basket, and, hmmmm... I've probably left something out. You'll just have to see it for yourself, and know this: while we won't be sending everyone home with a duffle bag full of Oz swag, the bar has been set very very high and I'm going to do my best as a mother and a human to at least reach some level of amazingness akin to this party. As God as my witness....

And good gravy please tell me you noticed the party guests plates were each on a piece of tree trunk. Sheesh.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some party prep to attend to. And please, for the love, someone buy me those shoes cause I needs em.

Pic Monkey to the rescue

I'm sure that by now, all of you that have ever used the photo editing site Picnik, know that the site will be shutting down as of April 19th. I first wrote about my love for Picnik HERE, and gushed about how easy it was to navigate through its special features and how glad I was to have found something that tech-challenged people, like myself, could use that yielded results like Photoshop.

But was NOT Photoshop.

Just saying the word Photoshop can send shivers up my spine.

 No joke.

I have it on my computer and have had about as much luck using it as I'd have if I were trying to do calculus. Do you read me?  I don't even have a clue what calculus is and looking at a page full of it is not unlike looking at the screen when Photoshop is open.

It goes something like this...

Whaaaa....??

I don't......

What in the.........??

And then I burst into tears.
Just like I did in my high school math classes.
And college math classes.

(You get the picture)

Several guys and gals in the blogoshpere tried to come up with lists of comparable alternatives, (here's a link to Kate's post) many of which I tried, but none came close to the ease of Picnik.

Until Pic Monkey.

That's right- a monkey.

Not quite sure why a monkey was chosen, but who cares. It's awesomesauce, and one of the reasons why could have something to do with the fact that several of Picnik's ex-employees designed Pic Monkey. Thank you ex-employees of Picnik, from the bottom of my heart. And so, now we have site that will once again allow us to add silly stickers and text and boost colors and crop and edit to our heart's content. I will now demonstrate the awesomeness of Pic Monkey by shamelessly showing you pics of my 3 offspring.

here's the shot, straight from the camera:

and here it is, softened a bit:

and sepia-ish:

and lomo-ish:

and then I went a bit crazy and threw a little of all of it in the pot, stirred it up, and hit 'save':

I mean, how cool is it to be able to play with your photos like this?

I'm working on a special home decor project right now and really wanted something bright. Lots of color pops, ya know?

and since I've already posted that many photos of my babes, I figured I'd do a few more...

LOVE MM's face in that one...

totally made me snort.

Out loud.

And now...

some Zoolander poses:

2 things to note:

that's a new headband that I'll be listing in my shop soon,

and

we're waiting on a phone call from Ford's any day now...

Happy Thursday Friends!