Creating and making invitations in Design Space is really fun and it’s an easy way to keep the cost down on all that expensive birthday stuff. Cricut has all the features you need to create completely custom holiday card or invitations in Design Space. Check out the video below for more details.
How to create invitations in Design Space
You’ll want to have a basic theme or concept in mind and you’ll want to either purchase your clip art in advance or make sure you have Cricut Access to use the best images available for your invitations in Design Space. Cricut also has a really good selection of digital paper you can use for backgrounds but if you’re idea or concept is really detailed you may want to purchase some digital paper (Etsy is a great place to do that) and upload the patterns into Design Space before you get started.
Creating your invitation background
Step 1: Open a new project and pull in a square from the “shapes” tool. Go to the right side tool bar and turn the square from “cut” to “print”.
Step 2: Once your square is set to “print” you will see an option for “patterns”. Select “patterns” and choose the pattern you’d like for your background. You can filter the pattern selection by using the tools at the bottom of the patterns box.
Step 3: Now that your box is filled with a pattern you’ll want to resize the box to either 4×6 or 5×7. I prefer the 4×6 because I can cut 2 of them out of 1 sheet of photo paper. With the 5×7 I can only cut one out.
Creating your text box
Step 1: Pull in another square and resize it to either 4×6 or 5×7. After you’ve resized it, lock the square and use the arrows to make it just a bit smaller than your background box. The idea here is to have a text box on top of your background box but you still want to see some of the background.
Step 2: Now you need to center the text box on top of the background box. To do this just place the text box on top of the background box and select both items. Once both are selected go to the top menu bar and select “Align” and then “Center Horizontally”. You’ll then go back and select both boxes again, got to “Align” and “Center Vertically”. Now your text box is exactly centered over your background box.
Step 3: Go over to the right tool bar and turn your text box from cut to print and then make it white. The basic background of your invitation is ready to go. Just make sure you select both boxes and group them together using the “group” tool in the top right tool box.
Making it pretty
From here you’ll need to create whatever text you want on the invitation using the fonts available in Cricut Design Space or using fonts you’ve uploaded along the way. You’ll also want to pull in any clip art or images you want to put on your invitation. Go crazy and have fun designing. Just make sure everything you’re putting on your invitation is set to PRINT and not cut. When it’s all designed just the way you want, go up to the left side of the top menu bar and click “select all”. With everything selected you’ll need to “group” it all together so nothing gets out of place.
Cutting out your invitations
Now that your invitation is all designed you need to cut it out. If you just leave it as is the only thing you’re set up to do is print. I mean you could just print them and cut each one out by hand but who wants to do that when you have your Cricut friend who can do it for you!
Step 1: Pull in another square and resize it to either 4×6 or 5×7. Leave the square as a “cut” but turn it a bright color so you can easily see it behind your invitation. Lock the square and use the arrows to make it just a tiny bit bigger than your invitation. Use the same method you used to align the text box and center your cut square behind your invitation.
Step 2: Select ONLY your invitation (make sure the cut square behind the invitation is not included in your selection) and click “flatten” from the bottom right tool box. This tells the Cricut to print everything on the invitation as one solid image.
Step 3: After you have flattened your invitation go up to the top menu bar and click “select all”. With everything selected, click “attach” in the bottom left tool bar. This tells your Cricut to print the invitation image and then come back and cut the square behind it.
Step 4: With everything still selected, “duplicate” as many times as you need to get the amount of invitations you want and then click “make it”.
That’s all there is to it, you’re all done. Making birthday invitations in Design Space is super easy. Make sure to watch the video for some tips on saving the invitation as a JPEG if you’re wanting to have them printed up at a print shop.
