It's almost the big day

It's almost here.  The day women dread from the time they turn 25....my 30th birthday is in August!  Aaaaaahhhh!

I've been throwing around whether or not I want to have a birthday party, and since there were a couple of challenges that I wanted to try I thought I'd make a first attempt at an invitation. 

The 30 is cut from Doodletype, and I wanted it to fill up almost the entire page.  It's a big deal, after all!  Then I wanted to add the little grasshopper from Stretch Your Imagination because...well...I think he's cute and I've always wanted to use him for something.  But I wanted to make him festive, so I added the party hat from Doodlecharms, cut with the blackout feature.  He's cut at 1.5 inches, the hat is at .75.  I even used some old Doodlebug paper for the hat- it's a doodle fest in here!

I embossed some white paper with my Cuttlebug Seeing Spots folder, and it looked SO HARSH against the blue.  So I used some blue and purple ink and one of my makeup sponges, and just inked all over the page.  It was still pretty harsh, so I pulled out my Ek Success corner rounder (the medium one) and chomped away.  That helped a lot.  Then I added the little hop marks with a black gel pen, and it was done!

Since it's an invitation, I had to include all of the information!  I used Pink by Design stamps Party Time for the entire page.  It has mix-and-match sentiments for all sorts of invitations.  It's great!  I stamped it in the same purple ink that I used for inking the front of the card. 



I'm not sure why the picture came out so yellow?  It's really a piece of white cardstock
and purple writing in real life.  I think it has to do with the flash being on.

 I plan to enter this card into the following challenges:

Fantabulous Cricut- Don't bug me
My Craft Spot- Birthday- what's your age?