ALOHA!

My best friend, The Duchess has a knack for buying bargains. If i want anything, i just tell her and she puts it on her shopping list, and eventually she calls me and has found it...usually on clearance. So, she has been planning a Luau for a while and when she found this pack of 8 invites for $.75, she couldn't pass them up. The above picture is what they looked like out of the package. pretty cute, huh? Well, not cute enough for her! So one day she asks me what i think they need, she was thinking about mounting them on paper and calling it a day. I had the great idea of wanting to put a 3D flower on her skirt or hair. One thing led to another, many bags and boxes were dug through and then we ended up with white flowers. Some were from a $.99 bag of miscellaneous flower heads she bought at wal-mart, some were from the $1 bin at target, and some, oddly enough, were from some flowers she bought 10 years ago to do something for a bridal shower for me!!!!

so we decide we can dye the flowers with our SU! inks. that goes pretty well. The fabric flowers did better than the paper ones, probably because they were thinner and could soak up the ink easier and also because they were more flexible and could be pressed into the ink pads easier. Yes, re-inkers would have made it a lot easier...but she didn't have them in the "right" colors!

Then we realize we need bling for the center of the flowers. She decides she is going to use crystal effects from SU! to adhere the flowers, and i realize that we could use glitter for the bling...it will still to the CE very well. Oh but no, she finds a bag of seed beads buried in her closet...let the sorting begin!

Once the flowers were dyed and the beads sorted out for the center bling...we began affixing them to the invites. The picture below is one in the process, she isn't totally blinged out yet!

Then finally the final product! The Duchess did not have to mail these, she only needed 5 or 6 and knew she could hand deliver them. I am not sure how well they would have held up in the mail, although CE seems to be pretty good stuff. The hula girl is mounted on the larger card with pop dots, so she is raised a bit. The type is printed off her computer! I think they look marvelous!