Yes, I wanted to make handmade invitations . . .

I love to be creative. I love to think of a fun idea and to work on it. Tim, one of our associate pastors has an event each year to recognize all the babies born in the previous year. At Trinity, we had 34 girls and 47 boys born in 2009. Isn't that unbelievable??? I decided to work at home on Wednesday morning because my silhouette SD software is downloaded onto the dinosaur computer. But I wanted to use the kitchen table for my work surface and wanted to have my work email open on the laptop. So this is where it all began . . . and no, I was not drinking a beer while doing work for the church at 9:00 a.m. That is the pepper shaker - guess I had used it while eating breakfast!

I was even smart enough to begin the morning with a recycling box for all of my handy dandy left over paper. Most of the big pieces made it into the box but there was a trail of "hanging chads" in pink and blue from one end of my house to the other. I even arrived at the hospital to visit a friend and looked down and there were blue paper dots on my brown shoes!

This is the design at it appears on my computer screen. The letter across the bottom spell the words "Baby Girl." You set up the design using the millions of downloadable files. Then you attach the paper to a sticky sheet and set it up in the machine (looks like a small printer). Then back to the computer screen to tell it to "cut."

The machine moans and groans (really!) and cuts and cuts and then ejects the paper. You then gently peel the cut design from the sticky mat. Fold, glue printed vellum onto colored sheet with glue dots. Then I glued the colored paper inside the invitation. I tried to pray for all of those babies as I worked on the invitations. I must admit that when I finished the last boy invitation, I cheered. It was a much bigger and much more time consuming project. I spent 3 1/2 hours at home working on Wednesday. I spent most of the afternoon Thursday in the office working on these and then almost 8 hours on Friday (yes, Friday is my off day . . .) But they are finished. The envelopes are addressed and they will go in the mail on Monday. Our church family loves our babies and we want their families to know that!! I will admit that being able to do these things (like make invitations for a special occasion) is one of the reasons I love my job. My job is never boring. I support two pastors and work with another staff person on lots of jobs. I also support most of the staff in some way or another by using our database. Since I'm a people person, dealing with different folks makes me happy . . .most of the time :-)

Here are some pictures of the "boy" invitations - the girl invitations were pink on the outside and that fun lime green on the inside. I had a hard time getting a clear picture but I think this will give you an idea - you can see how the letters are cut. The one of the invitation sitting in the basket is so you can see how the colored paper showed through.

There was also a sheet that went inside that said something like, "This is not a baptism or a baby dedication . ..this is simply a time of rejoicing with our church family with our newest babies." (something like that! - we had 47 boy babies and 34 girl babies born into our church family in 2009)

I feel blessed to work in a place - in a church - where we want everyone to feel the love of Jesus - to realize that each individual is loved by the church also!!