Cupcakes and Minecraft Invites!

UPDATE:  Minecraft Party Printables are now available through Paypal on the right hand column of the blog! 

Today the only decorating I'm doing consists of cakes and party invitations.  Since today is my son's 11th birthday.

It seems to be getting harder and harder for me every year on their birthdays.  And next year he heads off to middle school.  I don't know what I'm gonna do when they turn 16 or graduate and leave home.  Well, he and my daughter confessed that they will be staying with us forever.  Ummmm....  I said it is getting harder and harder to let go, I didn't say impossible ;-)   We will need a little break away at some point, lol.

But none the less, he keeps getting older and I keep getting younger.  I know, it's so weird how that works.  I just go with it.

He will be having a birthday party sleep over in a couple weeks that I am starting to prepare for, but today, I just wanted to do something a little low key.  When I asked him what he wanted for dinner tonight, he replied "a full rack of ribs and creamed corn."  LOL.  He's quirky like that.

Last night while we were heading to the store, he said, "make sure you get everything to make my cupcakes for my class tomorrow and make them the best flavored ones you ever have.  So that when my friends in class eat them, they will love them and want to come to my party." 

Really, it is like he's running for office or something!

So I threw together some vanilla and chocolate cupcakes (box mix, SHHH!) with some chocolate chip butter cream and ran them over to school this morning.

 I put the butter cream together using the wilton recipe and just added in the chocolate chips.  I 6 x'd the batch so the measurements were:

Wilton Buttercream Large Batch

3 (2 Ib.) bags of powdered sugar

2 tbsp. vanilla extract

1/4 - 1/2 C. Milk (Less for stiffer icing; more if you want a soft batch)

6 C. Crisco or (3 C. Crisco and 3 C. Butter)

1 Large Bag of chocolate chips  (Chop them up and throw them in to the butter cream when it is mixed, but save some to add to the top when you are all done.

* Note:  I always cover my mixer when making this with a wet kitchen towel to help with the mess. 

I put them in my handy dandy cupcake carrier and took them over to the class. 

The other thing I had to do today was make my son's invites and send them out for his party.  He is having a Minecraft themed party.  He is Minecraft crazy!  For those of you who don't have a son, Minecraft is a computer game where you build and create worlds and have these weird faced bad guys called Creepers attack you.  Well, at least that's how I see it.

So I tried my hand at making the invites after I saw one that I really liked on Etsy.  I went into Photoshop Elements to create it.  I pulled pictures from Google and layered them on top of each other to create an almost identical one to the inspirational picture I found. 

 I printed them out as a set of three per sheet and cut them out individually.

I love that they are like concert tickets!

I actually found the Minecraft font online too and embedded it into my Photoshop fonts.  Oh how I love fonts :-)

Even though I printed them out on card stock, I wanted a really heavy duty weight to them, so I put some glue on the back of the invite and adhered it to a second piece of card stock.  Then I cut them out one more time.

See it is a really thick invitation now and looks more professionally printed.

All finished and ready to send.  

 As you may be able to tell by all the arrows and words on my photos, I have been playing around on www.picmonkey.com.  It's a free website that allows you to "pretty up"  your pictures.  You can also upgrade for around $33 for the year, which is what I did, so that you can put all sorts of titles and arrows and whatever else you would like to on your photos to finish them off. 

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For information on my on-line design services, please click here.

For on-site design services {Greater Hampton Roads and Richmond Virginia}, please email seasideinteriors01@gmail.com for pricing and availability.

Seaside Interiors