DIY Birth Announcements

Hello, Lovelies! Dropping in today to share with you a post I was lucky enough to share with Kristens readers over at Life With The Ellwoods over a year ago.

Birth Announcements.
 You have to do them.  I mean, come on, you spent 9 months baking the bean you want to show him or her off.  But have you checked the price of them out?

Sorry kiddo, can't send you to college- we spent all our money on birth announcements. 

I spent hours pouring over the Internet looking for the perfect announcement.  The ones I absolutely loved?

These beauties are from Minted.com.  If you click on the picture it will link directly to the listing.

They were perfect, sweet, simple and unique.  Oh, yeah, they were also $2.20 each. We needed 100 to send out to all of our family/all of the people who came to the baby shower.

They had a similar one at Shutterfly.com

They were cheaper, at $1.35 each...but still way too much for my cheap pocket's liking.

Enter Pixlir.com.

I made these little babies for free, then printed 4x6 prints at Ritz camera to the tune of $0.09 each. Yeah, that's right nine cents each.  Oh, and the nice people at Ritz gave us the envelopes for free as well. Score!

If you haven't used pixlr before you need to check it out. You dont need an account, and it works like photoshop but is much easier. They have a few options, either express or avanced- but Express seems to work for most of my needs.

Start by uploading a photo, then have fun playing around with the different effects. You can add text, crop, color splash- tons and tons of different effects.

If you want a 4 x 8 flat card, just click on the collage tab at the beginning. Then you can choose your layout and upload photos from there.

Then choose your style, I like the four boxes side by side.
Drag and drop your pictures where you want them, leaving one block free for text. Once you finish, click finished and then it will bring you to the editing screen where you can add the effects you want.

When you're all done, click save- and thats all there is to it!

Then you just upload it to any photo printing site as a blank 4x8 card, and you're good to go.  We made similar ones for Grayson's baptism, and they cost $0.54 each at Ritz, and that included the envelopes.

And there you have it. DIY birth announcements for super cheap, and they take almost no time to make.