Where are the crafts?

I was just thinking today how the sub-title of this blog mentions things I'm interested in, yet I feel like I haven't posted much about any of them.  So, today I'm posting here about the bridal shower invites I made for a shower I co-hosted for my best friend.

I got the idea from some other websites to ask guests for recipes, being that the bride does little cooking/baking right now.  During wedding planning, I learned of Vistaprint.com and all of the amazing ways to get paper items at low/no cost.

After searching my emails from them with offers and their website's templates.  I came up with something that caught my eye.  An "oversized postcard" as the shower invite itself and "postcards" for the recipe cards.

Oversized postcard turned into invite:

 Front and back of recipe/postcard:

This is a business card (matching the recipe card) which gave invitees a clue of what was going on:

The issue then become that I had the invite, several recipe cards and business card for each person, but how did I organize it?  Just toss it all in an envelope?  So I took a trip to Michaels to brainstorm and found some scrapbook paper I loved.  Green with ivory dots; matching the fill-in of some of the hearts on the main invite.  Remembering how easy it was to make my panel/kangaroo pockets for for my wedding invite; I decided to make pouches for the recipe cards and then tie everything together.

Essentially I took a piece of 12x12 scrapbook paper; cut it in half (to 6"x12"), then folded in the sides for a nice edge, and used Zips glue stripes to adhere together.  Then I mounted the business card on cardstock and glued to the pouch:

Pouch for recipe cards:

Then adding a ribbon; I tied up the package to go:

Overall cost for enough supplies for 50 invites? (Yea, I didn't really send 50, but that was the minimum on the oversized postcards): $24 (it would have been only $14, but I paid $10 upgrade to have the back of the recipe/postcards printed in color)