My Son's birthday is just after Christmas, and the shine hasn't even worn off of his new toys.
We decided the best gift he could get was books. So, for an invitation, we made story books. I downloaded a free coloring book from the internet, made up a story to go with the pictures, reduced the artwork on a copier and pasted the printed story pages to the art with a plain old glue stick. We cut cardboard for the covers, sewed the paper pages together on the sewing machine, adding a decorative scrapbooking paper for the end papers, and glued fabric around the cardboard, sealing it with the end papers. I used t shirt transfers to iron the title and some more art to the cover of the book. All together, the fabric, paper, end papers, and printing came out to .98 per book. For the party, we used 4x8 sheets of cardboard (my favorite party decoration) and turned our dining room into a storybook castle. Everyone brought thier favorite story book for my son's shelf, and dressed up as one of it's characters. We used the Wilton two cake mix story book pan, and iced it to look like the three bears story, since there are three in our family. Car dealer flags on dowel rods went around our roof line to make the whole house look like a castle.