how to host a star wars party in 5 excuriatingly painstakingly detailed steps: part 2 - the invitation

Part 1 - the lightsabers

This one's going to be a little bit harder to give step-by-step instructions for. To begin with, I spent an embarrassing amount of time on the Star Wars Lego website. If you click on the link and take a look at the home page you'll see that that's where I took the header, side and footer from.

In order to use any of the elements from the website, I had to first save a screen shot containing each piece that I was interested in using. As I said, the main bones of the invite came from the home page, the majority of the rest came from the Comics link. I did remove the navigation bar at the top and elongated the whole thing in order to have room for all of the birthday party details. The picture in the window near the top came from one of the comic episodes, as did the silhouettes of Anakin, Asoka and R2D2 near the bottom.

All of these elements were put together in Gimp (a program similar to Photoshop but doesn't require one to sell a kidney to buy it it's free to download), and then the text was added one line at a time so that I could control the font size to give it the same look as the scrolling Star Wars intro.


I'm pretty proud of how seamless this looks, especially considering that it consists of at least eighteen different "layers" or elements. While it's hard to explain how this was done -especially to those who aren't familiar with Photoshop or Gimp- I think that this method can be used to make an invitation to fit any theme.

Someone suggested selling customized birthday invites on Etsy or the like, but I'm not sure of the logistics regarding using what I'm assuming are copyrighted images. Think there'd be a market for them?? ;)

How we did it:
pre-party planning and ideas
the invitation how-to
pool noodle lightsabers
marshmallow fondant
the cake (in less than 100 pictures)
the big day