Birth of a Birth Announcement . . .

After the Hubby nixed my request to buy a certain "high priced" set of baby announcements for Ollie, I knew that for the fourth time I would be hand crafting 100 announcements of my own custom design. I took to the internet looking for ideas {a luxury I didn't really have with Big C's announcements almost 12 years ago} and came across this cute girl announcement here.

Photo via Lucsious Verde

I knew I could make a reasonable knock-off at a fraction of the price, so I set out to put the pieces together, again utilizing the internet for each step. First, I scoured paper suppliers for a heavier than usual, high quality cardstock and envelopes in colors of periwinkle {cardstock} and chocolate brown {envelopes}, which I found for a deal here.

Next, I Googled 'dragonfly craft punch' and to my surprise, found the EXACT punch used on the designer announcement here. I ordered it, and upon it's arrival, spent a good hour punching out 100 delicate chocolate brown beauties on a slightly textured cardstock I purchased at Michael's craft store.

Then I ventured over to my brother's where he designed my concept for the actual announcement using Adobe Illustrator on his Macintosh {remember, I'm a novice who uses Microsoft Publisher and a PC, both huge no-nos in the design world}. Aside: One day I will have a Mac, if it kills me. I took his design over to Kinkos on a flash drive and they whipped out the chocolate brown printing, four-to-a-page, in no time flat and cut the announcements into quarters for me. While this step of the process was a bit pricey at $18.oo, it gave the announcements a professional looking print quality, instead of that "look what I made on my ink-jet printer" quality.

The next step can only be described as a true labor of love. My sister-in-law came over and hand punched all 400 corners off the 100 announcements until her thumb was throbbing and felt like it might fall off. Of course, we sat and chatted the entire time while I was working on another step in the process, so it was fun - but seriously - this girl must love me or be a complete glutton for punishment!

I think having rounded corners on the announcements made it look a little more professional and a little less homemade . . . at the expense of Audrey's thumb {mind you, she volunteered for the torture}.

Hmmm . . . that dotted line needs a little something at the end of it, don't you think?

My own version of torture involved hand-gluing 100 dragonflies on to 100 announcements. It took a long time and was very, very sticky - sticky enough to pull a leg hair off the Hubby one night while he watched me toil and labor with the glue stick and little flying creatures {at this point I might have cursed under my breath about how much easier it would have been to just by the gosh-darned expensive ones . . .}

Finally, after agonizing over which picture from my brother's photo shoot to use, I assembled all the finished components into the delicious brown envelopes and sent them on their merry way with a "celebrate" stamp in the corner. And now they are done and gone and I will never make birth announcements for one of my babies again.

Please forgive me if you did not get an announcement in the mail from me. Consider this virtual announcement as especially handmade just for you from me because I'm tired from making baby announcements and typing this post, but I still love you.

Total cost of announcements {minus postage}: $82.00

Total savings over expensive announcements: $68.00

Do NOT ask me if it was worth it.

ps. Full album of photoshoot pictures tomorrow.