We are knee-deep in planning our Halloween party, and our poor house (and bank account) is currently overwhelmed with projects, decorations, plans and the like. My husband and I both have a bizarre obsession with the Halloween, and usually over-do it if time and money allow. The past few years, life has forced us to tone it down a bit, but this year, we’re coming back swinging.

For the past two weeks, I studiously shopped around area craft stores, armed with various coupons, in hopes of coming up with a creative, homemade party invitation that did not require investment in expensive tools, like $20 edge punches or $30 stamps. I would rather spend that money on food and booze, thank you very much. I’ve been warring with myself to go cheap on the invitations (since they will just be thrown away anyway), but I still wanted to have something mildly original and interesting.

Here’s what I came up with:

First, the tools:

I found tri-fold black cards at Hobby Lobby, with matching envelopes:

I also got some vellum that can go through a printer, bright orange card stock (somewhat textured), Halloween ribbon and some 3D pumpkin stickers. Not pictured here are some glue dots and scrapbooking scissors that I already had.

My first step was to design the main content of the invitation on my computer, simply using some clip art and creative text-box placement on Microsoft Word. Once I did this, I estimated what size would fit on a 5 ¼ inch card, and figured I could print four invitations per vellum sheet. The end result looked like this:

Note that the personal info has been conveniently blurred for safety purposes. Once I had the invitation content, I started to construct the entire shebang. First, I cut the orange card stock down to 5 ¼ inches, which was the size of the inside surface of the black invitation cards:

I then trimmed the edges using some $1 scrapbooking scissors, so the orange cardstock would just fit inside the black invitation card with a sliver of black border showing. I secured the orange card stock to the invitation card with a couple of glue dots:

Next, I used another $1 pair of scrapbooking scissors to cut the vellum invitation sheets to a size I thought would be good, and secured them to the orange card stock for a layered look:

Again, some information is blurred to protect the innocent. Finally, I used some ribbon, glue dots and the pumpkin stickers to decorate the exterior of the cards:

The end result was a pile of cute, cheap invites for which I will still get the all-important cool Mom credit:

I only used a ruler once, and winged the rest of it, so I still got the warm fuzzies of making these myself, without the cost, expense or OCD melt-down of something more complicated. The plan is to address the envelopes with glitter gel pens, and use the sheet of gothic return address labels I made using Microsoft Word. I won’t show you those, because all you’d see is the safety-blur anyway.

Now, I can focus on the decorations…

Mwhahaha!