Halloween invitation

Click here for pictures and downloadable file.

I’ve been wanting to use these paper mache book boxes for a long time as party invitations. My opportunity arose when I decided to have a Halloween party for my daughter and her friends. Since they are all about 3-6 years old, I didn’t want to have a truly scary Halloween party. With the book boxes in my mind, I came up with doing A Storybook Halloween Party as my theme. Over the next couple of months, I will share with you all of my party throwing ideas and pictures. But first things first…the invitation.

First, I thought about paper macheing black tissue paper all over the box and then adding embellishments on top of that but after destroying my first box, I decided that was far too time consuming and messy. So instead, I opted to paint the areas of the box that would not be covered by other embellishments. Paint the edges of the box white where the paper would be. The brush strokes will make it look like pages. While the paint was drying, I booted up the old laptop and started searching for some images to use. I found cover art from some of my daughter’s favorite Halloween books. I simply printed them out to cut up and use on my book.



Once you have your images printed, arrange them all over the front, back and inside of your book. There’s no set way to do this, you just have to mix and match all of the images until you get an arrangement that you like.
For the actual party information part, I decided to use a metallic Sharpie to write the date, time, place on the binding of the book. This is a neat effect, making it look more like a “real” book.



Now, you are probably wondering, what to put inside the book? For me, I am going to include some Halloween candy, treats and miniature Halloween books. You can put anything you like in here. You could even put a small costume (think pirate patch, bunny ears, tiaras, etc.) or some face paints. The possibilities are endless.