Amy Scott's Thoughts

I knew that I wanted to do a birth announcement for Owen. Mailing announcements can be a bit old-school these days and snail mail isn’t the way most people communicate, but I like getting mail and sending it. When I received the birth announcements for my nephew and niece, I hung them on my fridge door for weeks. Now I don’t assume that everyone wants to put my kid’s picture on their fridge, but someone might, so I’ll give them an opportunity. With Owen being born in the fall, I knew I needed to do my announcements soon so they didn’t conflict with Christmas cards. I like to send my Christmas cards out at the very beginning of December and if I waited too long I would be doing two big mailings super close together. Waiting until December to do a Christmas card that doubled as a birth announcement seemed too long after Owen’s birthday.  After doing a lot of research, I decided that having birth announcements printed traditionally would be too expensive. This led me down a more creative road. I used Publisher to create an image using the clip art pieces that I had downloaded off of Etsy. The wood grain background was used for the artwork in Owen’s room and the forest animals were used for one of my baby showers. I figured since we’ve been going with a forest theme in everything Owen related, it would work well to continue it into his birth announcement.  It took me a while to get everything the way I liked it, but I was very pleased with the end result.  I used the image I created and a coupon for 100 free prints to make my birth announcements. I ordered plenty of birth announcements for only $7. All I had to do was pay tax & shipping with the free print coupon. Yes, the prints are on photo paper, but this was more in my budget than the expensive cardstock ones.  Overall, it was a lot of fun creating my own birth announcement. I love that I got use the super cute clip art in another way. I paid for it, so I might as well get my money’s worth out of it.  As silly as it seems, I have his birth announcement on my own fridge! Yes, I know the details. I was there. It’s hard to not want to look at that little face and I’m happy with how my work turned out. Consider this my blog style version of Owen’s birth announcement. Enjoy!