DIY HALLOWEEN COLORING BOOK INVITE

Last weekend I was able to head back to Texas to visit home, which is always a blessing because I love my family so much. During the holidays, my mother will buy specialty coloring books and leave them out with crayons at the dinner table for me to color. Let me stop you here, because I just want to acknowledge, yes, I am well aware that I am 24 and this sounds quite juvenile - but it is ridiculously relaxing. And it's something fun to do if there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but I still want to be in their company. I digress.

As much of a getaway as I find coloring to be, I thought the students I work with may benefit from it as well. I had been planning on making invite/reminders for an upcoming event and thought what better way then to combine the two? And thus - coloring book invites were born!

So I headed out to pick-up a coloring book, which was admittedly way more stressful than I expected. My mother had gotten her coloring books at Wal-Mart, but I couldn't find any at either of the local Wal-Marts in our town, nor at the Dollar Tree, nor at the local teacher store in town. If you plan on creating these, you may try calling places ahead, which I ultimately did and twas my luck that Target had one coloring book in the seasonal department!

THANK YOU TARGET.

 I will be honest that I was a little disappointed that it wasn't a traditional coloring book as I was really going for the nostalgia of the greyish paper and thick lines, whereas the Target coloring book has more modern sketches and the paper was pretty much white computer paper. If you're okay with that, you could probably just save yourself the drive and find some Halloween printables online (these are SUPER cute.)

The pages were the same size as the paper I was using for invites so they needed a trim (and I suggest trimming the perforated edge regardless.)

I am proud that I held the paper, cut it, and took this photo all by
my lonesome. #CraftingAllstar if I don't say so myself.

The trickiest part was figuring out what needed to be printed where, which really isn't that tricky at all, but on this particular moment I was struggling quite a bit. The bottom section will be what is on the top of the tri-fold, so for my invites I wanted the name on the outside. The font I used for the names was Alice In Wonderland. The top section will be the first section the person will see when they open the invite/life the top flap. 

The coloring page I placed on the opposite side of the text.

The next step is probably the weirdest to explain...

When making my invites I folded the colored paper first, by itself. Then I opened up the folded piece and taped down one corner of the coloring page on the inside, then folded the coloring page within the invite, and then lastly taped down the other corner. I personally found that if I had taped down the coloring page first and then folded everything altogether, there were weird ripples. If you've perfected double paper folding, then by golly you do it however you want! This was just the technique that worked best for me. 

As I said, bottom corner was already taped, then I started
to fold it all together, lastly taping the other corner as
everything was folded.

Et voila! I had originally bought black ribbon to tie it up nice and neat, but I left it in my car and was in a rush to get these out, so... Overall I liked the way they turned out! I would like to adventure with different stationary, different coloring sheets, and including crayons in the future.

xoxo e