My Halloween Invite for 2013. Contact and location information was removed for privacy.

Here is my latest Halloween invite. I wish I could say it was entirely my idea, but thanks to Mrs. Poli of Love and Lace, she inspired me to create my own. Here’s my tutorial:

Find a high definition(HD) image of a Ouija board – like this one found at Imperfectly Possible. Even a newbie can use Photoshop Elements/Paint/Word for this job. Don’t have Photoshop Elements? You can download a 30-day trial. Although you can do it entirely in Photoshop(or really in Paint), I’ll be speaking to those who aren’t Photoshop savvy and we’ll be using both.

Steps for Invites

Open your HD image in Elements, use the clone tool to eliminate the words your don’t want, but keeping the wood grain background (you can actually also do this in Paint with selecting, cutting, and pasting – a longer process).

Download the font to match the other writing on the board. As suggested with Love and Lace, I downloaded Captain Howdy for free at Urban Fonts. Although it worked, that font doesn’t allow for differences in caps and lower case. It also is a bit finicky with bold depending upon what size font you use.

Once it is downloaded, re-size the cloned board in Paint or Elements to your preferred invitation size. I filled an entire page. Open Word >Insert>Picture and select the touched image. Pull the handles if you need to re-size again.

Adding Text Boxes

Click Insert>Text Box> Draw Own(located at bottom). It worked out better for me to do several boxes instead of one big one. Changing the line and background of the box to transparent depends upon what year of Word you have. I have 2010, so once the box was made, I clicked on Format>Text Fill> No Fill. This allowed the background of wood grain to be seen. Then I clicked on Text Outline>No Outline. Now there would be no box line as well.

Inserting Your Text

Choose Word Art and then play around with the features. To change the font to Captain Howdy or another, just highlight words typed and go to the Home menu or right click to choose font/size.

For the gypsy girl, I did a black and white search until I found the image at Fan Pop and re-sized it to fit a page in Paint. Then I took the eraser and deleted some of the ball dots to allow for text. When I tried to fill the background black, it filled one of her hands. I painted around that one hand in black paint(which kept hand white) and re-filled background black. I then inserted it in another Word page.

What I didn’t Like About Invites

Because I needed to convey a lot of info, I had to put too many words on the board. I could have made another page with the info, but I felt making another board wouldn’t do. I thought about placing a huge planchette image on a page for the rest – which probably would have worked even better. Yet, because of time and knowing the mad rush would ensue shortly, I chose to stick with what I made.

I did a practice email with someone else’s computer to check if it was readable and found because of the fonts used (not common for most users), it didn’t look right. To prevent this issue, I converted my Word document into an image(JPEG). So I suggest for printing, use the Word Doc., for emails, convert to image.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your ideas. If you made your own Ouija or other crafty invites, please send them my way too.Thanks!