Curious?

Sneak Peak of Ellie's Curious George Birthday

got the idea from here

Banana Invitation

I forget where I saw it first but I loved the peeling banana invitation idea.
Here is my version. I gave my banana a back peel, partly because I thought it would look complete and partly because the off-white card stock wasn't as sturdy as I thought, it was packaged with a piece of cardboard in the middle of the stack.
To tie it into the Curious George theme I made a produce sticker that says Curious? Peel me. I added a generic monkey or banana sticker to the back of the envelope.

How I did it:
Found a clip art banana shape (unpeeled).
Using Paint made it an outline.
Copied outline into Publisher and, using multiple text boxes, filled the top half of banana with details
Grouped the design and copied multiple times on a page, close together. (didn't worry about overlapping/losing the outline of the banana as long as the words were there.)
Printed as many pages as I needed.
Printed 3 banana outlines (in the same size!) on a sturdy card stock.
One outline was cut on the inside of the ink outline (cutting away the black outline) also cut stem off of this one (just eye-balled a rounded top)
Cut on the outside of the other 2, cutting the stem off of one.

Using the smaller stem-less banana, I traced (in pencil) the banana around the words anywhere that the outline had been cut off in publisher.
I cut out the paper bananas, just to the inside of the ink outline/trimming off just a bit of the ink/pencil marking.
The other, slightly larger, bananas were traced onto yellow felt using a brown marker. I traced an even amount of stemmed and stemless felt banana shapes.

Using the same brown marker I colored the stems of the stemmed ones, and added brown blotches (not on the on pictured) and drew the line (where the banana peel separates) down the entire banana of the stemless felt banana.
Next I ran the paper bananas through my xyron, words side up.
The sticker bananas were placed centered onto the stemmed felt banana.
Using the paper banana as a guide, I cut down the stemless felt banana, about half way, just to the bottom of the invite info.
I spread glue evenly onto the bottom, wordless, half of the paper banana, and stuck the cut felt banana to the paper banana, covering the paper banana.

For the stickers:
I found a good quality curious George logo and snipped (screen shot) the image of "Curious", copied in Paint.
Then, using Word, I made a yellow ? with a shadow and snipped/copied it to the Paint also
I had to edit the Curious part a bit so the ? would show up behind it.
(I couldn't match the font of "curious" perfectly so I thought it would work to put the ? Behind in a similar font/different color rather than try to add a ? to the end of the logo.
Under the curious? I put the words "peel me" in the same font as the ? (ms script bold I think). I added the oval around it all to mimic a Dole or Chiquita sticker.
I saved the sticker image to my computer.
Using Avery.com, I put the image onto mailing labels (2 ovals per mailing label, 3 will fit vertically but 2 horizontally gives some wiggle room)

(the image could be printed a bunch of times on paper then ran through the xyron or just glued but I have a small label obsession.)
Cut out the oval and stick to the banana skin.