Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Doctor Who Birthday: Step 1: Invitations

My son Stuart will be 8 in less than 2 weeks. Up until about a week or so ago we were going to have a Knights of The Round Table themed party, then out of the blue he changed his mind. His most recent favorite show is Doctor Who, he is OBSESSED!!  (what am I saying...so am I!!!) It isn't any wonder though, the child loves anything to do with science, particularly outer space. So, he has asked for a Doctor Who party and I am more than happy to oblige but my time was limited.

One thing I have noticed is that if you are doing last minute Doctor Who party planning in the U.S. be prepared to get crafty. There is official licensed merchandise but it is all in the U.K. Since I only had a couple weeks to prepare I had a brief moment of panic and then called on fellow Whovians for help with ideas. This particular blog post is about the invitations. I will bog about the rest as I go along.

The only materials I used were photo/printer paper, printer, glue stick, scissors, and construction paper.

Here is the finished product, along with homemade envelope and if I say so myself (and I do), I did a pretty good job.


First take a piece of contruction paper or cardstock and fold it in half length wise.


While folded in half cut it into two pieces and you will have two blank note cards ready to be decorated.




For the images I started by doing a Google image search for Doctor Who Invitations to see what grabbed my attention. I really liked this one


made by a blogger named Nancy Dorcer (you can find her post along with a template here). Hers came complete with a drawing of the invitation Doctor Who uses in Season 6, episode 1. I only wanted to the top picture so I cropped that part out.

Then I took this picture of my son from Baltimore Comicon,



and edited it to fit in this picture from Doctor Who.




 (don't mind my mediocre photo editing skills)



Then I typed out the following invitation and used my editing software to do an overlay of the TARDIS. To do that you need a program that works with layers, I put the TARDIS picture as my top layer and then slowly adjusted the transparency until I could see the invitation clearly.






Resulting in this



If you want to put actual coordinates to your house go to Google maps, type in your address, on the red marker you will right click and then select "what's here" this will change your address to coordinates which I thought was a fun touch and reminiscent of The Doctor's own invitation.Once I had them all printed and cut I simply glued them onto my card the way I liked best.

The envelope was really simple. For this part get a piece of construction paper, glue stick, straight edge and scissors. First, I took the paper and using the straight edge drew a line, I then cut along this line so my paper would be in the shape of a square:


Then I turned it so it was a diamond , placed the card in the center to make sure the paper would get folded to the proper dimensions and folded in the corners, starting with the bottom and then the sides.





Remove the card and then seal the edges with a glue stick, making sure to only glue the edges and not the inside.



Once the envelope is dry you can put the card in and seal it up with glue. Since I used black paper I glued a piece of lighter paper on the front so the address could be seen clearly. I also added a small picture of the TARDIS just for an added touch.

My son is so excited about them he made me keep one to put in a scrap book. :)

Got any fun birthday invitation ideas? I would love to hear about them

2 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for this great idea - I love knowing that everyone else is going through what I am facing - of having to get very creative since the US is lacking in anything Doctor Who.

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  2. Great ideas! America isn't the only place lacking on the Doctor Who stuff, it's even harder to find here in Japan. I'm always glad to find some DIY Doctor Who stuff online, thanks for posting!

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