The Birthday - Invitations

My daughter's third birthday is coming up in just a few days. How did that happen? She was due three years ago today. She did not arrive three years ago today. I remember those few extra days felt like an eternity.

My husband and I decided to keep birthday party preparations simple and inexpensive. I had originally planned on using the watercolor notecards as invitations, but then I came across Wordle. It's really a fun (and rather addictive) program. My husband tells me that the technology is very simple and is used frequently to sort words, searches, and categories by popularity. Indeed, since being introduced to this technique, I have noticed its use all over the Internet. As soon as I started playing with it, I knew we had found our invitations.

I fiddled with it for quite a while, trying to find the right colors and configuration. You can choose font and palette on Wordle, but the word order is randomized, so I had to click through a lot of options before finding one that looked right. I typed in my daughter's name and the word "Birthday" multiple times and every other word only once. That made "_____'s Birthday" prominent.

Once I found a configuration that I liked, I turned it over to my husband. He found a photo from the 4th of July (our girl making silly faces and holding her first sparkler while wearing her pajamas), edited out the background, and put it together with the Wordle cloud in Photoshop. He printed it on 4"x6" photo paper, I printed party details on plain copy paper and used double-sided tape to attach it to the back of the photo, and...we were done. It was really easy (except, I will say, the Photoshop editing. I don't know that it was really difficult, but it was time consuming. Thanks, sweetheart.)

These were fun to make. My daughter loves them. She has her own copy and she calls it her "picture of me with the words".