Party Season – Invitations from Paper Shaker

Here come the parties!

The Wee Man and Bubby D will be celebrating their birthdays next month, and so the party planning has now begun in earnest. (In fact, Wee Man starting planning his part at least five months ago – but it’s only in the last couple of weeks that I actually booked the date). Huge excitement! And lots to sort out still too.

But of course there is the first step – let people know about it 🙂

Usually I help the kids hand make invitations – it’s a fun activity for them and I must admit I quite enjoy it too. But with two parties this year (it’s the first time Bubby D has had a party of her own) as well as a 3 month old to look after I simply couldn’t face it, and so we turned to the professionals for some personalised party invitations instead.

Paper Shaker offer a whole range of shapes and sizes of invite as well as a good selection of designs. The Wee Man and Bubby D loved sitting at the PC with me and scrolling through the options, picking out invites that appealed to them. Initially the Wee Man in particular was confused – he thought he could only choose the ones which said ‘5’ until I explained we could change the number, the colours and the illustrations (all of which are set around a group of particular themes including robots, owls, animals, dinosaurs and space). After that he got much more involved, even sitting at the PC himself and clicking through the options, moving robots, balloons and ice creams around. And Bubby D was easy to please – as soon as she saw a princess invitation she was happy! So I got to play around with hers myself, and in general it was very easy and intuitive although I did find it frustrating that each invitation had a specific set number of illustrations that could be used – a bit more flexibility with the graphics and text boxes would have been useful).

Designs chosen, their information was typed in and checked – and then we just had to decide which photos to use with them.

Not all the invitation options had space for photos, but the invite that the Wee Man eventually settled on had space for one, and Bubby D’s had room for two (from a whole range offering anything between 0-7 spaces). They were both incredibly excited when they saw pictures of themselves turning up as a part of their designs!

So that was the invitations finished, or so I thought – except then it turned out we had to choose ‘finishes’ and envelopes. The Wee Man went for a simple gloss finish on his, along with some blue envelopes; whereas Bubby D decided she liked the sound of ‘pearlised’ – she IS having a princess party, after all. It wasn’t clear from the website really how this would actually look but we decided to go for it and see what it turned out like.

And a couple of days later, the invitations arrived through our door, and we found out 🙂

I was very impressed with how the invitations were packed and presented, with every 10 invitations in their own little sturdy velcro fastened box. The kids were absolutely thrilled with how they’d turned out too – they postman arrived 30 minutes before the school run and they were adamant they needed to get them addressed and give them out that morning, they were so excited!

It turns out that ‘pearlised’ really is a very nice finish too – Bubby D got lots of lovely comments on her ‘beautiful invitation’ and people weren’t just talking about the photo of her showing off her favourite hat that was on the front of it!

They aren’t the cheapest of invites (prices start from 75p each) but of course, they don’t look cheap either! If like me you really want personalised, well made cards that stand out from the generic crowd then this is definitely the place to go – we were very happy indeed with how ours came out and I’ll know where to go next time I want something special to start the party season 🙂