E has been into pirates lately and I thought it would make a great birthday party theme, so I asked him and he agreed. I looked up several ideas for making invitations, but ended up just doing my own thing. Here are the steps I did.
First, print off half sheet sized invitations. I made the invitations in microsoft publisher and created the little map on the bottom with a dotted line, clip art, and a letter X. Simple!
Then we used a jolly roger stamp from walmart and some ink (couldn't find my black until we were completely done....so blue it is!) You could also just print a jolly roger on the invitation, but isn't this more fun?
Then, crumple up all the invitations. Nearly four year olds think this is pretty awesome. :)
Next you need to warm up a bowl of water and get out some regular tea bags. E also had a lot of fun with this next step. Take a tea bag, dip it in the water for a few seconds (maybe 10?), squeeze out a little bit of the water and then rub the tea bag (gently!!!) along the top of every invitation.
I liked crumpling the invitations first because then there were definitely areas that received darker tea stains than others.
Let them air dry and voila!
We also rolled up our invitations and tied them off with ribbon. If you're really ambitious, you could put each invitation in a glass bottle or something, but really? Four year olds and glass bottles? No.
