Chapter 1: The Invitations (Book Club Birthday)

It is time to continue with our celebratory story!

This story begins–as all parties should–with a great invitation! A library book card invitation!

Alas, an element of irony is already introduced to our story since none of the party guests have experienced libraries with actual cards in the books. I’m certain they all had to ask their mothers what significance this card held. As I, too, had to explain to my daughter, that this was, indeed, the perfect invitation for her party–even if she had never seen anything like it before.

The anticipation began to build as I posted this photo to Facebook of our invitations in media res. I felt fortunate to have my young apprentice/birthday girl to aid in the slave labor artistic process of invitation assembly. We created a pattern for the book page envelopes, from a package of colorful teaching supply (bulletin board?) envelopes from the dollar store. By carefully taking apart the envelope, we created the perfect pattern for our book page pocket envelope. And I must confess that real books were, indeed, harmed in the making of this birthday party but that they were purchased from the Dollar Store for only a dollar a piece. A simple stripe of purple washi tape seemed the perfect touch to tie in the birthday girl’s favorite color and add an element of youthfulness to our seriously studious party.

To personalize the invitations for our guests, we used letter stickers as a monogram and wrote the rest of their names in sparkly ink.

Inside our guests were instructed to come to our “library” for this special occasion.

I did some research and found the library card template from the authoresses at eighteen25. It made a great basis for my invitation, which I recolored and edited to reflect the birthday girl and convey the necessary information to her guests.

As you may see from the illustrations, I renamed our house as a library and titled our party “The Book Club Birthday.” Perhaps it would have been more accurate to give myself credit as the author, but the day was all about my daughter, so she received the billing.

The invitations were then delivered to the intended recipients, at which point, one can only imagine, many conversations were had about the good old days before the invention of such things as barcode scanners. *sigh*

This is still the beginning of our novel! Please return for more drama, more mystery, and more attempts at alliteration, as I recount the remainder of the details surrounding my daughter’s literary 11th birthday. Consult the Table of Contents for specific chapters.