Tea Party Invite & Envelope Printable

Mad Hatters Unbirthday Party Themed Invite/ Notecard

 

A couple of years ago DM and I decided to host one big party per year, to celebrate Summer and well… just because we wanted to! The first year we held an Unbirthday Themed Party. I made a cake and decorations and sent out letterpress invites I’d made. We gave away gifts to all of the children who attended, had a piñata including gifts for the adults, and ate way too much cake whilst quaffing alcohol laced lemonade.

Unfortunately we don’t have many photos of the table or event as we had so much fun we forgot to take photos! Last years event was a little more sedate and adult in nature. And this years will be even quieter as I’ll be 7 months pregnant when the time comes.

But since the first party, I’ve often looked at the letterpress invites and have wanted to do something more with them. So I’ve decided to create printables so you lovely people can use them as invites or note cards.

They’re really simple to put together, just cut out, fold and add a little bit of glue to the envelope. You can download each of the templates below. You’ll need A3 paper for the envelope and A4 Card stock for the invite/ card.

 

 

Click Here to Download the Tea Party Suite Envelope
Click Here to Download the Tea Party Suite Invite

  Please do not link to my templates directly, if you want to share my work, please link back to this blog post.

Thank you.

 

 

Tea Party Invite and Envelope Printable by Next to Nicx by Nicola Pravato is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Hexagonal gift boxes

 

 

If you live in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Peru, Switzerland, Canada, Belgium or Brazil (along with a host of other countries) it’s coming up to Mothers Day. Stumped as to a gift idea? Why not make or bake your mum something sweet and nestle it in a cute hexagon gift box?

 I’ve had a bit of fun messing around with watercolour splodges and have come up with a couple of templates for you to download and make up. Or you can download the blank template and decorate as you wish!

 

For this project you’ll need:
Adhesive or double-sided tape
The thickest A4 card stock you can put through your printer (mine takes 200gsm, but check your printer for details)
Scissors, scalpel or exacto knife
Some decorative ribbon (I’ve marked cutouts to allow for 10mm wide ribbon)
Some paints, crayons, pencils or other decorative materials (if working with the blank template)

 

 

The templates make up 2 sized boxes 72mm wide in diameter (point to point) x 60mm high
and 90mm wide in diameter (point to point) x 43mm high

 You could easily scale them up and print on A3 card if you required them to be larger.

 

 

For the ones above I did some quick watercolour scribbles and added handwritten notes in white pencil (white charcoal pencil to be exact). But the sky is the limit. You could bedazzle, embroider, paint, draw… whatever you’d like! This would be rather a lovely project to work on with a small child as you could cut it out and they could decorate the box as they wish and with a little help from you, assemble it.

 

 

Print and cut out your desired template. I cut my templates out using my Graphtec cutter/ plotter but it’s not a difficult template to cut out by hand.

 

 

If you’ve printed out the plain template, now is the time to get scribbling and decorating to your hearts content!

 

 

Fold along each of the dotted lines and glue the edge tab to the underside of the opposing panel to create the hexagonal shape.

 

 

If you need a ‘base’ in your gift box for heavier gifts, glue one set of the top tabs and gift box lids together for extra support as shown (I used strong double-sided tape).

 

 

To attach the ribbon, glue the ribbon to the underside of the tab shown and thread through the ribbon slot as shown.

 

 

Then thread through the corresponding ribbon slot in the lid, pulling though and aligning the lid and tabs. Repeat on both sides and tie into a pretty bow.

 

 

And there you have it. Pretty hexagonal gift boxes ready for your gift!

 

 

Download the 72 x 60 patterned gift box here (67mb)
Download the 72 x 60 plain gift box here (67mb)
Download the 90 x 43 patterned gift box here (112mb)
Download the 90 x 43 plain gift box here (112mb)

Apologies for the large size files and so slow load times. I am still trying to find a way to reduce them further.

 

 

 Please do not link to my templates directly, if you want to share my work, please link back to this blog post.
Thank you.

 

Hexagonal gift boxes by Next to Nicx by Nicola Pravato is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

 

Easter Eggs

Due to illness and lethargy, I’ve not made any eggs this year. But for the many of you who have found next to nicx over the last few months, I thought I’d share some of the eggs I made last year.

They were very easy.

I made stencils out of sticky backed plastic on my plotter cutter (but you could easily use store bought stickers).
I then carefully applied them to the blown and cleaned eggs.
Painting the eggs and over the stencils with matt acrylic paint.
When the paint had dried, I run a scalpel along the edges of the stencil to make sure the edges were nice and clean.
Very carefully removing the stencil and then cleaning up some of the messier lines with a scalpel (you can etch into the egg slightly).
I then ran ribbon and a bead through the holes in the top and bottom of the blown eggs for hanging.

I was really happy with how they turned out.

Here’s the Star Wars egg I made for my husband. I hope eventually to have made him an army ;)

I hope you’re all having a wonderful Easter weekend!

Nicx

Paper Tea Cups #1

I’ve been messing around with paper. I’m not sure exactly why I decided to make paper tea cups, but inspiration hit over the holidays and I couldn’t find one online. Hence the gauntlet was thrown down! I had to make one. It took me a lot longer than I anticipated. But I’m ecstatic with the results! This is by far and away my favourite template/ tutorial so far. AND I’ve got another version of it almost ready to upload next week.

These would be perfect as use for cupcakes, biscuits, little presents, used as gift boxes or just as gorgeous packaging. Paint them, embroider them, bedazzle them… The options are endless! I created a lid template so it becomes a very usable gift box but I had a lightening bolt moment last night and I’m now sure I’ve worked out how to make a lid that sits inside the cup so that the pretty outer lines of the tea cup aren’t ruined. I’ll include it with the other version of the tea cup that I’ll upload next week.

 

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A little festive flair

In only 11 sleeps Christmas is here! My husband and I are staying in Switzerland this year and so I’ve been able to let myself go a little crazy in the decoration department. In part because we’re not going to be spending it with our family and we still want it to feel special!

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money but wanted a big statement piece over the dining table, I had decided to hang a series of small Christmas tree’s upside down over the table (we’ve 5 quite hefty hooks in the ceiling for just such decorating purposes). But DM pooh-poohed the idea. Read more

Christmas Packaging- Milk Cartons

 
I’ve been busy creating items for Christmas this week. I’ve been struggling to pin down what I wanted to do for our Christmas cards. I love what I’ve made but there’s just a few things that I’m not 100% happy with. So I put the card project aside to come back to and started creating packaging for the Dulce de Leche I made the other day.

I thought that as I’m basically giving away cooked milk I’d put them into little milk cartons.

This is the result! What do you think?

I think they’d also make lovely boxes for small gifts or for biscuits or little Christmas cakes.
 

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