Making the Carnival Wedding Tickets was a little bit fiddly, but it's definitely do-able, even if you're not a professional graphic designer. The secret is to be adaptable, and use the computer programmes you understand. For me, that's Picasa, Word and iPhoto. Picasa is a free programme, which you can download from the internet, and it's seriously easy to use. This tutorial will help you adapt any free printable, so it's worth saving!
First of all I downloaded a free printable of a carnival ticket invitation that best resembled the look I wanted. I found this amazing template from The Burk Family Blog via Pinterest {right click, Save As onto your Desktop}. To find your own template, the best search to use is 'free printables' and then any other key word. If you can't find one on Pinterest, then Google Images is a great place to look as well.
The next challenge was to delete all the bits I didn't want. Both Picasa and iPhoto have 'Retouch' functions. I find the iPhoto Retouch the most effective, so I imported the file into iPhoto and smudged away.
Now I needed to add in my own text. I couldn't find exactly the same font that Becky-Lee Burk from The Burk Family Blog had used, so instead I did a search for 'free circus fonts'. Luckily Magic Jelly blog had pulled this fantastic selection together, and I chose Big Top. Free fonts are really easy to download to your computer, particularly if you have a mac. Just drag them into the Fonts folder (find it via the search in the top right hand corner of your screen), and they'll appear in your software programmes.
I needed to print nearly 50 invitations, and I wanted them to be about 2" by 4" - so it made sense to print about 12 per A4 page. First of all I tried the Picasa collage function, but they didn't fit properly, so instead I opened Word and fiddled with the Insert a Picture function for a good long while. Eventually I managed to get them to fit, although I had to thin the borders, and make sure the Print function didn't add them back in. It took a few practice prints on plain paper, but eventually I won, and printed them out on 220gsm red card {not too thick for my printer, but not too thin either}. A quick slice of the guillotine, and I was done.
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