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...

Topiaries on a Tuesday

Helloooooo!

If you stopped by yesterday, you know that I'm in full swing preparing for my girls' party on Saturday. Our babes are 12 months apart, and actually had their birthdays in May, but we'll be celebrating this weekend,

so....

that means I have a to-do list longer than Casey Anthony's nose.

(if she were Pinocchio)

Anyone else out there not believing a word she or her attorneys are sayin?

Ah well,

I digress...

Here's a pic I showed you yesterday of some cute naked topiaries-

Picked these up at the hob lob last Friday and scored one of them for 40% off with my handy dandy coupon. (Not even gonna lie that we considered making our purchases, going to lunch, and then going BACK so that we could use the coupon again. Didn't do it, but we considered...)

The pots were 2.17 and were 50% off last week, so I got BOTH of them for 2.17. (see how fast I did that math?) The moss was 4.99, and the topiaries were 11.99 and 7.19 (with coupon).

And I know what you're thinkin- isn't 20 bucks a bit steep to be spending for a little table decor at a birthday party? And you'd be right.

That's way more than I usually spend on projects, BUT, I figured as long as I made whatever I covered it in removable I could use them over and over again for different parties/seasons and really get my money's worth.

moving on...

For MM's party table (Very Hungry Caterpillar) I knew I wanted the topiaries to be covered in RED. My first plan was to make little rossettes like I showed you in THIS post, but after making a few and attaching them, I decided it just wasn't what I wanted.

The red fleece and the scissors are the only things I ended up using outta this pic... I had planned to use the top to the snack jar as a template, but it was too big.

See the big circle punch? THAT's what I ended up using as a pattern to cut out about 100 circles from my fleece. They're a little over an inch in diameter...

Since I knew I wanted to be able to remove whatever I put on the topiaries (so that I could use them over and over) my first thought was to put velcro on the topiaries and the backs of whatever I decided to put on them.

Since I scrapped the rossette idea and decided to go with lots and lots of little red circles, the velcro idea also got scrapped since I'd need too much of it.

Here's what I went with-

yep.

A good 'ole folded up square of scotch tape.

Worked like a charm.

I started from the bottom of the topiary, overlapping my circles a bit-

like this...

and just kept working my way around...

until it was completely covered-

Then I covered the top part the same way-

Now for the bottom...

I grabbed that bag of reindeer moss,

which looks like this when out of the bag-

 I should probably warn you that this is messy...

Anywho, just heat up that glue gun and start gluing down that moss. No special technique...just glue it down until all of the green foam is covered.

Pretty, huh?

Still working on finishing the second one, but my plan is to have these at each of the ends of the dessert table with little buntings connecting them to the cupcake stand in the middle.

Can't you just see it?

*****

Here's a few party pics I added after publishing this post-

****

So...I'm off to get cracking on the 328 other projects I've got going at the moment. I'll be back soon with some 4th of July decor ideas + printables.

I leave you today with 2 pics-

1 is cute as pie...

other than the 'sun is in my face' smiles-

and 1 is weird as all get-out...

the hubs did a lil' kayak-turning practice in the kids pool last night.

There's no telling what the neighbors think of us...

I've linked this to:
Weekend Wrap-up at Tatertots and Jello

It's party time and a weekend recap

Happy Monday everyone!

Hope you had a great weekend!

We had absolutely beautiful weather, once again!

 Went to a birthday party, did a lil' shopping, and spent some time in my aunt and uncle's pool yesterday.

I.Love.Summer.

And speaking of summer, it's a season of the year when we're usually NOT celebrating birthdays at our house. In our family of 5, we have one birthday in February, one in March, and three in May. However, some unexpected circumstances arose and parties got postponed, and then postponed again, and so...this Saturday we will be celebrating the birthdays of 2 little girls at our house.

finally.

We've decided to have a very low-key party with our family and friends-

I didn't even send out invitations.

Can you believe it?

Nevermind that our only computer with a word processor is broken and I refuse to pay money for invites when I can make them myself. Just not with a broken computer...

You may recall I posted about the themes of their parties many moons ago, but here's a quick recap- 

Eliza is all about shoes and Barbie right now, so her party theme will be some of this:

with a little of this on the side-

by the way- this is THE most precious book about a little girl that loves to wear her mommas high-heels. You can find it on Amazon HERE if you know of a little girl who needs this.

Sweet story, gorgeous illustrations, perfect for my E.

Mary Martin's party theme is this:

We'll have a dessert table for each of them so that I can use all of this party stuff I bought back in March and April. And since Saturday happens to be the 2nd of July, you know I'll have to throw in some red, white, and blue decor as well. I'll be posting my projects all week long, with the grand finale being the party itself. Oh how I just LOVE crafting for a party. Here's a peak at what I'll be tackling first-

found these topiary things at the hob lob on friday and have a grand plan for them on MM's birthday table. Just need to do a little spray painting, and cover with some moss and felt.

found these on clearance at the hob lob.

also plan to spray paint and use on MM's table.

you won't even recognize them when I'm done.

promise.

here's some of that patriotic flair I talked about adding-

scored these at 40% off at hob lob, and since I own a small fortune of srapbook paper, I plan to make LOTS of these suckers. LOVE me some pinwheels.

this pennant banner is actually what I was working on the other night when my machine died. Still haven't heard the outcome. (it's still in the shop)

Here's hoping it's fixed and home soon so I can finish that baby and hang it up!

***

and for the grandmas-

O man picked out this lego for hubs for Father's Day and they spent all of Thursday afternoon putting it together.

of course, it made this little girl jealous that O was getting to play with Daddy and she was not...

speaking of that little girl, she now likes to help with the laundry.

She also likes to tell you what each piece of clothing is before she throws it in the dryer.

Laundry time is lasting a bit longer these days...

Today at the pool.

Oh how I love how well our kiddos sleep after they've been swimming all day...

and this little one?

well she's just cute.