Whether you are hosting a baby or bridal shower, or just having a few girlfriends over for brunch, you can set the tone with a fantastic invitation.

But custom printed invitations are PRI-CEY. And print-your-own invitations can look a little stock and feel flimsy or cheap. But never fear: you can make your own for a lot less than retail!

First, I opened the simple  paint program that came on my laptop. For this design, I wanted chevron stripes, but regular stripes, gingham, or polka dots would also be very cute. First I drew zig-zag lines across the top of the page.

1) Then I used the rectangular select tool to copy the top zig-zag line down the rest of the page. Select-copy-paste-paste-paste. 2) Next use the “flood fill” tool to fill in every other open space with the color of your choice. 3) Continue to flood fill in with accent color until every other white stripe is colored. 4) Finally, flood fill the black lines with white to make them disappear.

Now you can save that image and open a Word document.

Insert the chevron stripes picture as a background image by clicking Insert>Picture>[select image file].

Then make that into a background image by clicking Format>Text Wrapping>Behind Text.

Phewf, okay! You’ve made it this far! Next, all you need to do is type your party information in a cute font!

Now, you can print your creation out at home onto smooth cardstock or–better!–a lovely textured cardstock, like this Neenah linen finish (of course, unless you are going to use quite a lot of it either immediately or eventually, a $30 ream of paper makes most balk. And you can add a LOT to the quality of your invitation by saving it to a flash drive (as a PDF, so the formatting doesn’t change), and take it to an office supply store print shop (like Office Max). If your invitations are 5″ x 7″, they can print out two-to-a-page. Using their plain cardstock is about $1/sheet printed (so about 50-cents per invitation, but if you take your own [nicer] paper in, the copies are about half as much, and they look SO good. You can also pay about $1/cut to have a whole stack of 8.5″ x 11″ sheets cut down to your invitation size in one fell swoop.

Okay, and since I am a bit of a stationery-ista after designing custom stationery & invitations for about eight years, I’d suggest getting fancy-nancy envelopes if the number of invitations you’re printing merits the cost of a 250-count box. These are both stacks of 25 envelopes–see the difference in thickness? BUT you can also pick up a pack of envelopes at an office supply store or from Michael’s (the above left are from Michael’s and were about $6/pack with a 40% off coupon).

And voila! You went and made your very own custom chevron invitations! Now let’s party!

And just for you, sweet friends, below are three versions of this background you can just save to use straight from here! Enjoy! [To save:  Click>View Image>Right Click>Save Image As]

So, anyone else going to find an excuse for a party now? Wheee!