Making Birth Announcements

Christina Crawford: Hi, I am Christina Crawford and I have been a stamping for 12 years. I am a Stampin' Up! demonstrator. And this video is titled How to Make Creative Beautiful Baby Shower Invitation and also some baby announcements. And sometimes you don't know if you are going to have a boy or a girl. I know I have three daughters and I was surprised each times and that was so hard for me to not find out, especially with the technology we have today. But a lot of times people want to be surprised or they don't know for sure. So they are just going to keep things neutral as far as getting the announcements ready, you want to do that because you have a lot of time -- not a lot time, but you are going to have less time after the baby is born. So if you want to get some announcements ready now you are going to keep the color little neutral. Neutral colors that could be boy or girl or really anything but pink and blue. So right now I have this beautiful green it's a certainly celery color it's very trendy right now, beautiful. And just to give it a little bit of an embellishment, again it does not have to be a card that opens up, an announcement can be right on a postcard. So this is a postcard size card stock, it is actually one fourth of an eight and a half by eleven piece of card stock. Paper just doesn't hold up as sturdy, but it's the traditional size. And when I am doing now I am using this gray corner punch. And when you use that there is a little guide there that lets you know that paper had to go right in that right angle there. And then you just give it a little snip and it will actually cut the corners for you. And so when you slide in your paper it just gives it a little bit of a neat look so not have to tape it down, it's in there pretty securely. Really kind of fun. If you want to you can go ahead and take some stamps and just have fun. Now, these are also stamps from polka dots and petals and these are just polka dots really and just popping these all over the place, and then some more stamps but that just to keep it fun. Now, you can go ahead and make a lot of these and put them together if you want to and just get ready for the baby to come. So you can see how pretty that looks. That is just Certainly Celery ink on the white, on the Certainly Celery card stock. And these are Stampin Up! colors and that is why it is such an interesting name, Certainly Celery. But what you can also do if you are you are looking for some stamps there are some stamps on the market this. One is adorable it is called bundle of joy and there is actually a stamp that will let you stamp it now and fill it out later with the baby's name the birthday and how much the baby weighed when he or she was born. So you can use something like this just to embellish. You can stamp that on to a white piece of paper, cut out and use it for layering. Or if you want to, and this is my favorite thing to do, is just take the vellum, put it to your card stock and print out all the information. And if you do that the way to get the vellum on the card would just be to overlap it and you can punch a couple of holes here and this is my rectangle punch and create a flat bow or I did a couple of flat bows already with my other video clips. So look at those, but I will show you something different now. Flat bows are my favorite and I tend to so those over and over. This is some really pretty black and white gingham ribbon. Again it is keeping it really neutral, but it is also keeping it really fun and then what I will do is just tie it into a bow. I am going to tie mine into a knot first, just seems to work for me. And you can see that I am doing this upside down because that also seems to work for me. You can have fun, you can put a little bit of a color into it if you want to. You could even change the color of this ribbon. If you want to, you can take a black and white gingham ribbon, and take your Certainly Celery marker and color the ribbon and it looks like it's green and black instead of black and white, is not it cool? If I thought about that earlier I would had my marker out to show you off but here is the bow. And now again when you are ready you just slip those into those corners slot that you created with the punch. And this is something that you can so in advance while you are waiting for your baby to come. Of course this is very versatile so if you want to you can turn this into a baby shower invitation if you are not expecting the baby but your friend or your sister is. And this is just a cute idea. Now, I got this idea from my friend Kristine when her baby was born, she made one that looks very similar. She didn't if Delaney was going to be a boy or a girl and then she went ahead and put that information on it. She also stamped and embossed two feet and then down below it says our family has grown by two feet, isnt that cute? So these are great ideas I hope that you like it and I hope it gets you inspired to create your own baby announcement. The next one I would like to show you is another baby announcement so stay tuned and watch that one. It's a lot of fun. Thanks.