Invites: Fiesta Forty!

Hard to believe:

--that I'm planning another party

--that it's my 40th birthday party 

Many in my position would let the date pass hoping no one would notice, ask, or heaven forbid, celebrate, but I've never been shy about my years. I figure if I've made it this far I might as well celebrate! I've earned whatever marks age is leaving on me and, more importantly, I have so much to be happy about--no room to worry about looking older. 

So here it is: the birthday invite.

I'm going with a flirty fiesta theme so I decided to design the invite with some Mexican Papel Picado (hand cut paper) banners.  As I've confessed previously, I have the ideas but not the skills when it comes to graphic design. I really do wish I knew how to do this in Illustrator or Photoshop but my tool by default? Microsoft PowerPoint! At least the byproduct of years of creating marketing presentations in PowerPoint is a bit of knowledge about drawing in that program. Pretty fun really. So I created this banner with its drawing tools and even embellished the standard Goudy Stout Windows font with triangular "cut-outs" to give it a more south-of-the-border feel.

In case there are others of you out there who haven't found the time to take that online Illustrator course and might like to leverage my PowerPoint efforts, I'm sharing the file here:

Fiesta Forty Invite Template_AestheticNest

A few notes about the file:

• The graphics are all "grouped". If you want to edit just ungroup and change at will.
• As mentioned, I embellished the font, so if you aren't doing invites for a 40th and want to change the wording on the front, or the number inside, you'll just need to move around the little triangles. 
• I have the file set up with blank spacer slides so that you can print 4-up, double-sided on card stock and have 2 invites per letter-sized card stock sheet (see thumbnails of the layout below).
• I went to a local copy/print shop to have these printed for better color. Would have been fun to try something offset but I was a bit shy about starting the conversation out with a description of my PowerPoint file!