Sea Party Invitation

Did I say I was finished with the "three under the sea" birthday party posts?  Oops!  Well, before I start posting my ideas for birthday number 4, I realized I never shared the finished invitations for number 3.

I think I mentioned this image in an early party planning post. Like many of my images, I found it on Graphics Fairy.

I cleaned it up a bit by adjusting the contrast and brightness in photoshop.  As long as I had the editing software open, I played around a little with the sea creatures.  I felt like the sea horse on the bottom right was getting lost so I made him bigger and brighter.  Those 2 ugly guys on the bottom left bothered me, so I replaced them with a purple octopus, image also courtesy of Graphics Fairy.  Finally, I played around with the lettering, trying to make a verse that rhymes and fits well with the graphics.  I think all three birthday invites have had similarly rhyming verse.  You can see previous invites here and here.

So, why is there a square version of the invitation?  Well, I needed to get the invitations sent out before we went onvacation and suddenly I was hit with technical difficulties galore.  My computer was updated and got a newer version of Photoshop, which somehow did not include illustrator, making it impossible to open the invitation that I designed a few months earlier.  Then I tried just adding the words to the blank design, thankfully I had that part saved as a JPEG, but couldn't get the wording to not pixilate without the illustraor program.   I am sure it was all dumb stuff I was doing wrong, but then when my home printer no longer recognized my updated computer, I decided I was just sending out evites this year.  I still really wanted to use my original invitation image, but quickly learned that you have to use an evite template which is not customizable.

Fortunately, evite did have templates that included an area to upload a picture.  So, I just cropped my invitation to be a square and saved it as a JPEG.  I adjusted the writing a little to make it all fit.  I found a template that had colors and a design that coordinated with my theme and went with it.  You can see the finished evite above.  I am not sure if I will continue using evites next year, but it did solve several problems this year and it was neat to have a running tally of who was and was not coming to the party.