Keep Calm and...Come Play with Us

Every time Christmas or her birthday rolls around, I never quite know what to give my grandma. This is the woman who babysat my brother when my mom went back to work, took us to the beach every summer, took my sister and I on shopping sprees for our birthday, attended every sporting event and awards ceremony she possibly could, and even paid for my college education. Basically, she is amazing so I want to make sure I do something that will make her happy.

The only problem is that like many reasonable people her age, she doesn’t really want more stuff. She has tons of interests and I could give her endless accessories for her house, but she doesn’t need any more seashell-themed things for her living room. She is beautiful and has a great sense of style so we do buy her some clothes, but we want to do more than give her a couple sweaters for Christmas.

This year, instead of giving her stuff, we decided to give her an experience. My grandma loves spending time with us (who can blame her?) and we sure enjoy her company too, so my sis and I decided to take her to tea with my mom this year.

But this is not a post about the tea party…because we haven’t gone yet (we’ve all been busy). We are planning to go this weekend.

This post is about the invite. The challenge with giving someone an experience is that unless you have tickets to unwrap, the whole gift-giving process is kind of dull.  I decided to make an invitation in Photoshop, although I think it would be pretty easy to make it in Word too.

The invitation was a play on the “Keep Calm and Carry On” British World War 2 poster that you see all over the place.

To make the poster, I downloaded the “Keep Calm” font from K-Type.com, which even the crown icon. First, I made the background color pink. Then I made I separate text box for the crown icon, “Keep”, “Calm”, “and”, and “Drink Tea” so that I could easily control how close together each line was. Once I sized everything properly, I arranged all of the items so that their center points were aligned.

Next, I created a new Photoshop document to be the back of the invitation. Using the same font (not in all caps) I wrote, “Your lovely granddaughters and daughter invite you to channel your inner Kate Middleton and join us for afternoon tea at Peacock Alley in the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC.” I didn’t specify the date because my grandma is a super busy lady and I wanted to see what her schedule was like first. And I kept the crown on the front rather than a tea cup because I mentioned HRH on the back.

I printed the invite on cardstock from a regular inkjet printer and put it in an envelope for her to open on Christmas day. 

She loved it, and we can’t wait to go get tea together. I think that the Keep Calm poster makes a great invitation, and you could use it in many ways—bridal and baby showers, birthday parties, etc.