30th Birthday Party - Leaving the Roaring 20s Behind Theme - Invitations

My family is really big into throwing everyone in our family a surprise 30th birthday.  Well I'm the last of 4 girls, so I knew the surprise would be coming and asked if I could crash the party planning.  We came up with the theme "Leaving the Roaring 20s Behind", which I am so excited to dress up for! My family LOVES to party plan and I think we do a pretty damn good job! You can be the judge ;-)

Here are some of my beginning thoughts once you come up with your theme.

Pick a date and location
Finding a location can be super tricky..How much work do you want to put into planning? Do you want a caterer/wait staff available or do you want a hall and you do the work/provide the food/drinks/etc?  Do you want to rent a mansion?

I went back and forth with this. Yes, having a place that caters and takes care of linens, plates, silverware, and everything is AWESOME! So much less work, but there are some things you have to consider: does the place fit your theme? Are you willing to sacrifice some decorating that you wanted if you can't decorate the walls, don't have the space, or both? As much as I wanted a mansion, there is no way I was justifying that cost to my husband!

I really wanted to make my own photobooth for this party (which I did last year for my husband's 30th, so I think I worked out the kinks!) and knew that I was going to be limited with decorating based on the places I found.  I also am having a party in the heart of holiday party season, which makes it way more difficult to find a place.

Soo...that's why we went with a blank slate! A rectangle hall with a bar.  All food and drinks will have to be provided by us, but I can decorate however I WANT!!! Woohoo!!! To get an idea of how crazy I am, I want to decorate the entire room..... I mean covering wall to wall. Think Great Gatsby!

You can essentially turn any space in a theme-oriented space, it just takes some planning.  

Good thing my family loves me!! :-D


Invitations
Now I went through pinterest and etsy to find something I was interested in and found this:

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/435090013975007291/ 

I wanted to make my own invitations.  I used Microsoft Publisher because it is easier for me to drag the text boxes around, but you can also use Word or some other word processor.

The following site was a fabulous resource for different paid and free fonts you can use:
http://www.blogher.com/throwing-1920s-great-gatsby-party-menu-book 

Using the different fonts, I created this invite:

I printed it on ivory paper. On the bottom is a qr code that I created; when scanned, it brought them to a google doc for responses that would automatically be uploaded to my computer.  If you scan the code on my invite, you will see that it brings you to the site that I used to create the code.

Many more 20s themed posts will be coming soon as decorations are created and ordered as well as how to put together your own photo booth!

Thanks for looking!