Graduation Announcements - Elizabeth,CO

Not crafty. There are so many ways to do this online for a variety of prices. Check out vistaprint for instance. I also like tiny prints and expressionary, but a l lot of their stuff is pricey.

Also, you could jus thead to Michaels or Ac Moore with your daughter. You can buy card stock and high quality stickers and print them from your computer. Lots of doo-dads to add on too. That can add up in price, but you migh have fun doing it together. And onc eyou have a plan, she could probably assemble the majority of them.

Whatever you do, I think doing them yourself is more personal.

Lot of people I know have just designed a photo "card" at Walgreens or something and mailed them. Usually it doubles as an invite to the graduation party. They have used a cap & gown photo and a baby photo--something like that. Very cute.

I love your idea of the Xmas card. Even cheaper would be to make them into postcards so that the photo is on one side, announcement and address on another. I am sure there are a lot of online places that can do this. The only one I know of is cellphonepostcards.com They're only 99 cents each and that includes the stamp (mailing it to each recipient). The only thing I don't like about them is there are very limited characters and you can't bold/center anything like that. I'm sure another website is more accomodating.

(I made my own postcards for my wedding invites. Took some work to do them myself, but the people at Office Max were very nice and helped me center them so that we fit them on fewest sheets of paper possible and the front/back matched up). Postcard postage is so much more affordable!

My neices and nephews have done the exact same thing - a nice photograph and they edited it in word or photoshop with invitation and graduation specifics then went to kinkos and printed it in color.
One nephew made his a postcard and actually scanned and pasted the "graduation seal" fromt the formal invitations.
You can also use places like Walgreens, shutterfly and the holiday card shops online to create grad announcements/invitations.
I completely agree with your stance on the official invitations!
Good luck!

My daughter will also graduate in 2012. But she goes to a small, but public Arts school (with an application, audition and acceptance entry policy). Things are in limbo as far as yearbooks even this year (I sure hope they get it figured out soon, as last years was wonderful and I want a similar experience for her senior year!).

They are not even required to have a "senior picture" to hand in for yearbook purposes, but do their own in house artistic stuff. SO I am not sure what the plan will be offered for graduation materials? But as far as the open house invites, we WILL be doing those on our own in a similar online fashion that others mentioned. We did our Christmas cards using her art last year and they were SUPER easy and very well recieved!

We also had several grad party open hosues (3 on our street alone) that we attended last year, and all were totally different, even tho they graduated form the same local high school. They all did their own thing! With the resources available online and with all those crafty scrapboking Mama's, I would be surprised if more than half of any graduating class actually went with the school offered options?

Be creative, even if that just means lookign online for a layout you like, add a picture or 2 and punch in the dates and times! Thats what we plan to do...but want to wait until closer to the party so we can perhaps add the info about her intended college plans. 2 of our neighbors had picture sof their daughters standing in front of the campus main entrance signs as part of their collage of pics on a grad invite party card. I liked that!

Have fun with it!