Young Women Birthday Gifts

Part of our birthday gifts this year for the Young Women are these cute note cards that they are to use to brighten someone else's day. It goes really well with the theme to Arise and shine forth.

I followed these directions except that I cut my card stock for only 4 cards to a page and I don't own any cute paper punches.

You know what that means, right?

Yep, I cut out each shape by hand. With about 32 girls at 4 cards each, I decided not to do several layers of the shapes on each card and only sewed on one shape per note card instead. I made a stencil for each shape and just had it sitting out to work on whenever I had spare time using leftover paper scraps from this project. I did hearts, stars, butterflies and birds. It was easy!

Then I printed out strips of paper and wrapped up four note cards for each girl.

We also made the girls cute little zip pouches.

 

May Your Life Preach More Loudly Than Your Lips

Cropped to print 8x10. 

"May your life preach more loudly than your lips." -William Ellery Channing

Cropped to print 5x7.

Arise and Shine Forth New Beginnings

For our Young Women New Beginnings night this year, we decided to use the mutual theme for the year, "Arise and Shine Forth". We thought hot air balloons fit perfectly with the theme so the week before the event we had the young women help make paper hot air balloons, modifying these directions. It was simple enough that most of the girls were able to easily make them with regular scrapbook paper and glue sticks.

 

To decorate the room, we strung crochet thread across the room (from air vents and existing screws...didn't want to make holes in the walls) and just taped up crepe paper streamers at random, purposely uneven intervals and then hung the hot air balloons with Christmas ornament wires, making sure our decorations were high enough that they wouldn't choke our attendees. ;)

My awesome friend Sara, who is also one of my counselors, made up a cute banner for the front of the room. It was lovely and dressed up the space quite nicely.

The girls also cut out small balloons for the pudding filled (YUM) chocolate cupcakes we made. We taped them to long toothpicks, (I cannot remember what they are called, but they're longer than regular toothpicks and smaller than skewers) and inserted them in the cupcake "baskets" to complete the hot air balloon theme. These hot air balloon cupcake tops were really simple so about 30 girls, ages 12 - 18 could make them, but were also really cute! Mixed among the cupcakes on the cupcake stand were hot air balloon Reese's and Rolo's. Some people don't like cake, ya know.

In my rush to finish up before parents and young women arrived, my photos were taken too quickly and this one and only shot I got of the dessert table is blurry. Buuuugs me. :(

It can be difficult to make the church building looked decorated enough to truly have that payoff for all your effort, but this time, we were really wowed. It did take time, but it was simple enough that we were able to have the girls assist us and that was what was important to me.