Sesame Street Pop-Up Birthday Invitation

Ok, here we go! For my first project to post I have decided to post the invitation I designed and made for my son's 2nd birthday party.

He LOVES Sesame Street and when I bought the Sesame Street Friends and Sesame Street Font cricut cartridges I had his party planned in my head already. I think his birthday was probably about 9 months away--maybe I just needed an excuse to buy the cartridges?? ;-)

This invite was also the first project I did on my new Gypsy!! I will give you step-by-step, detailed directions on how I made the invite.

Step 1: First I "layed out" all of the parts to Big Bird on a 12x12 mat on the Gypsy screen. Big Bird and all of the parts were cut at a height of 10.23. All of the pieces will cut proportionately to each other. Example: If you cut Big Bird's body at 10.23 his eyes, tongue, etc will also need to be cut at 10.23 to fit his body correctly. If you don't own a Gypsy or Design Studio you could probably cut all of the pieces at 10 1/4 or 10" and it would probably fit just fine on the card. Just make sure you do not use the "Real Dial Size" button or you will really get eyeballs and other parts that are actually 10 1/4"!

Then I layed out the paper to cut on the mat and cut the pieces out. It is much easier to load all the different colors for all the cuts and make all the cuts at the same time. You save so much time loading and unloading the mat. (Thanks for showing me this awesome time-saver Pink Stamper!)After the images were cut, I just put them together. The pieces you should have are Big Bird's background in black, body in yellow, tongue and eyelids in dark pink, eyes in white, smaller part of tongue in light pink, and eyelids in blue. Note: I threw away the pink parts to Big Birds legs because they will be hiding behind the card so I didn't want to mess with them.

Step 2: Next I moved on to the easy guy: Elmo! I did all of the same things as above on Big Bird, except he was cut at 5.14". I cut out a black background, red body, orange nose, and white eyes. He was much easier than Big Bird. Not so many pieces!! Put him together just as you did with Big Bird.

Step 3: Now onto a harder one: Oscar. Repeat all of the steps as above. I cut him at 6.26". He should have a black background, white eyes, green body, brown eyebrows, pink tongue, and grey trash can. The hardest thing about Oscar was cutting out the green body. His green fur was so intricate that my paper kept tearing. I tried everything but in the end, I opened a brand new mat and that helped.

Step 4: Cut out two pieces of black cardstock 5 1/2" x 8 1/2". On one of the pieces of black cardstock, tape down the three characters with part of their body hanging over the edge. You may have to experiment with this a bit before they fit right. You are going to want them to fold down without hanging over the edges of the card.

Step 5: Adhere the next piece of black cardstock on top of cardstock with characters. Making sure the edges align properly.

Step 6: Cut out Sesame Street Sign with the height set to 1.53". You will cut out the background in white, the sign in green, and the outside border in yellow. Adhere them together and apply them to the top of the card. Here is a screen shot of how I layed them out on the mat.



Step 7: I cut out the letter "M" for my son's name and the number "2" for his age. Then I welded the word "Birthday" together with my Gypsy. All of these items were cut at 1 inch. I put the pieces together and then typed out an invite. The invite I typed was mostly trial and error. I printed it out several times before I got the spacing right for the "M", "2", and "Birthday".





Step 8: Using a bone folder, fold the characters over the edges of the top black cardstock and lie them flat so the card can fit into an envelope. I used a greeting card envelope that is 5 3/4" x 8 3/4".









Phew!! That was a long one. I hope I explained it well enough and I'm sorry if I rambled on. For the birthday party I had planned on making party favors and decorations with these carts as well, but I am a procrastinator and I ran out of time!! Let me know if you have any comments or questions. Thanks for checking it out.