A Fabulous Night for a New Beginning

I am lucky enough to work with the youth at church.  I love it.  It is one of the coolest things that I've ever done at church.  That being said every year we hold an event called New Beginnings where we welcome in all the lovely young ladies turning 12, and coming into the program.  Our newbies are referred to as Beehives.  So because I'm always looking for a reason to craft.  I thought this would be the best excuse ever to make something special for our new ladies.

First I started out with 2 wooden plaques that I snagged at Hobby Lobby for $2.99 each, and as always I seem incapable of getting a clear before picture.  I'm also apparently unable to get a picture that doesn't in someway showcase my foot, and/or the fact that I was wearing pajama pants far too long that day.

After lightly sanding all the sharp edges I painted the edge with some acrylic paint (the color was vanilla cream) I had on hand.  Normally I would have then antiqued it with some glaze, but I held back because I don't think of shabby chic when I think of a 12 year old.

While those dried I then started looking at colors/paper patterns.  I had bought the plaques with the intention of painting them, and then using my DIY decoupage glue for the beehive and the bees.  However, I found the blue papers in my really big awesome book of rarely used craft paper, and decided to use them to make this a full on decoupage project.  I texted this out to my peeps, aka my fabulous sisters, (What up Tracie, Melissa, and Bethany).  My sisters are crazy super awesome, and have no problem being brutally honest when asked.  Sometimes every DIYer needs a little hand holding, and a little tough love.  Anyway, I was leaning toward the color combo on the right, and the sisters agreed.  

Ah, there's the foot and pjs again.  Oh well, sometimes when inspiration hits, getting dressed for the day doesn't really seem like a pressing matter anymore.  To save on dry time I used spray adhesive on the paper to adhere it to the wooden plaque in lieu of the decoupage glue all together.  I really loved how it turned out.

Why yes those are adorable snails on my jammies, but I digress.  Then it was time to place the beehive and bees on.  I also used spray adhesive for these, and the green paper.  I found the graphics for the bees and beehive at Graphics Fairy.  

After getting this far I was at a cross roads again.  So I went back to my sisters for more of that honesty that I love so much.

I needed input on whether I should use the Young Women's Motto, or...

If I should put beehive.  The sisters were in accord.  So beehive won out.  Here is where I wish I had time to either cut out all the letters, stencil the letters (which I stink at), or had a fancy printer that cuts them out for me (hint, hint Señor Hotness).  As it was I left a bit of white peeking around all the letters.  Hopefully the girls didn't mind.

But more opinions were still needed.  There was a weird blank spot.  So the sisters provided me with my much needed input once again.

I didn't want it to be too busy, but I really liked the flowers.  My fantastic sisters assured me that you couldn't have bees without flowers.  So then I got busy, and using the spray adhesive I added the finishing touches to the pieces.

So then I thought the only thing missing was something to protect it.  So I grabbed out my trusty polycrylic, and gave it all a good solid coat.  This made the paper start to bubble.  So pulled out my blow dryer, since it was cold and muggy the day I was doing this, to help with drying.  However, using the polycrylic made the the adhesive on the blue paper come loose.  So what I didn't was wait for it to completely dry, and the areas where the paper had loosened I used additional spray adhesive to re-adhere it.

The end product ended up looking super cute, and on the back I made a printout of the history behind why we call our super duper awesome newbies Beehive.

The total overall cost of the plaques came to $5 a piece, and they were super fun to make.  The night turned out awesome, and thanks to our older girls and their moms we were able to really pull off a fantastically fun night for all of our new ladies.

I thought I would throw in a few pictures of our lovely refreshments table for our event.  Our theme for the evening was "Diamonds in the Rough" with a black and white color scheme.

We found all of these decorations at the Dollar Tree.  Included the fake diamonds, and the black rock we used as our faux coal.  So for very little $$$ we were able to have a great impact, and have a lovely party to welcome our new young ladies into the program.

The moral of the story is, if you don't have a bunch of super awesome sisters...you need some, and that you don't need a large budget to have a large impact.

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