I feel a little behind this year.  Ian’s birthday is next month and I have only been working on his invitations for about a week.

Ian decided in December that he wanted a Ninja Turtle birthday party.  I knew it was on the list of parties but didn’t know he wanted it this year.  (He has the next six birthday’s planned, yep, he takes after me.)

I decided I wanted his invitations to be a pop-up card with the front as a sewer cover.  I designed them knowing I would need to use my favorite thing about the Silhouette.  It’s Print ‘N Cut feature!

It is the main reason I got it and it just so happens that this month’s Silhouette Challenge was to make a project using this very thing I love so much.

I started with a picture of a NYC manhole cover.  I used Photoshop to make the sewer cover look a little more comic-booky.  I couldn’t find a TMNT one with out words on it, and while I could have altered it in Photoshop to remove the words, I just didn’t want to go the trouble, this was easier.

I had thought about having just a circle card, but the pop-up part would have been to small, or the circle card would have been too big. So I used a card template from SVG Cuts Haunted Forest kit.

I needed something above the manhole cover, and I didn’t want to use a solid color so I used a picture of NYC that I found on one of the TMNT sites.  Since the angle of the city is from the street it worked perfectly.  For that part and the sewer cover I used the fill with pattern feature, or more accurately, I dragged and dropped the pictures into the shapes.

I used foam dimensional tabs to raise the ‘Let’s Party’ text.

I didn’t want to apply the letters individually to each invitation.  I connected them with the offset tool, I made the offset as small as possible while still maintaining connections between each letter.

It was still in two parts, but that was better than 9 parts.

I made the “Ian is turning 5” part in Photoshop and traced it in Studio.

But a TMNT party invitation would not be complete with out some Ninja Turtles!

p.s. I decided to use the Old-School version from my childhood because I like them the best.

I traced a PNG copy of a picture of the four of them coming out of a sewer.  This was the part that I wanted to use as a pop-up.

It is pretty amazing how close and accurately the Silhouette cuts with the print ‘n cut feature.  I could even cut out the little spaces on the bottom that would have been white after printing.  There is no way I would have been able to cut that out by hand.

The party information will be printed out on vellum and attached to the bottom of the inside. I decided on vellum because I didn’t want the inside to be white.  I could have printed it on colored paper, but with the size of the card I couldn’t get two on one page, and I hate wasting paper.

Stay tuned for how the party turned out and all the other things I will make, although you will have to wait till a couple of months.

Want to Check Out More Silhouette Projects?

My Silhouette Challenge buddies and I are all sharing projects on our blogs today, so pursue the projects below for a wealth of Silhouette inspiration!  With a heavy emphasis on hearts!

1. Clever Someday // 2. TitiCrafty // 3. GingerSnapCrafts.com // 4. My Paper Craze // 5. Simply Kelly Designs // 6. Little Blue’s Room // 7. Mama Sonshine // 8. Small Stuff Counts // 9. Dragonfly & Lily Pads // 10. GiveMeAPaintbrush // 11. Please Excuse My Craftermath… // 12. Barb’s Life // 13. GetSilvered // 14. Lil’ Mrs. Tori // 15. Minted Strawberry // 16. unOriginal Mom // 17. Where The Smiles Have Been // 18. Persia Lou // 19. Silhouette School // 20. From Whine to Whine // 21. DailyDwelling // 22. Creative Ramblings // 23. Paper Garden Projects // 24. It Happens in a Blink // 25. Perfectly Fabulous // 26. Adventures in All Things Food // 27. Create & Babble