i love lemon

A few months ago I was asked to design the invitations for our youth group's annual parent teen cookout.  I took a page out of Jordan's book to make these nifty invites that only took me a few hours total, although I completed the project over the course of a couple of days.  I bought kraft boxes in bulk from Paper Mart, 5 pounds of Lemonheads from Candy Direct, and printed the invitations myself.    

I filled about half of the boxes with a layer of Lemonheads before running out so some quick thinking was needed.  I was making 50 invitations and only had about 25 boxes filled.  That meant I needed about 5 more pounds of Lemonheads and I didn't have enough time to order another bulk delivery.  I called a few local candy shops but the prices were ridiculous... $14 per pound?!  Were they joking?!  More thinking.  I knew I had seen Lemonheads at the Dollar Tree down the street from our house so I hopped in the car and was there in about one and half minutes.  Success!  I bought something like fifteen bags of candy and was able to completely fill the rest of the boxes.  My advice is this: if you decide to recreate these invitations figure that you need about 5 pounds of Lemonheads for every 25 boxes and place your order accordingly.  

My next piece of advice - print one invitation and have it copied at Office Max or somewhere so you're not babysitting your inkjet printer for 45 minutes!  These babies were double-sided which accounts for the extra long print time.  After they were printed I cut them down to size and rounded the corners.   

Rule number three is buy enough ribbon.  I don't know what kind of math calculations I was doing while in the aisle at Joann's but it was horrifically incorrect.  I only bought enough of the coordinating yellow and white ribbon to wrap maybe ten or twelve of the boxes.  That's right, I still had about forty more to go.  Instead of leaving the house to go to the store for the fifth time that day I dug into my stash of ribbons and fortunately found enough bright scraps to finish the job.    

I handed them out over the next couple of weeks and parents and teens alike were excited at the prospect of the candy inside.  I had teens begging me for extra invitations, so I directed them to their local Dollar Tree where an 8 oz. bag is, you guessed it, a dollar!    

Here is a similar project from Brooke over at inchmark that's perfect for any happy occasion.  Have a great weekend!