Superhero Girl's Camp: Pallet Signs

We wanted to come up with a way to designate what campsite each of our wards would be assigned and incorporate our awesome Value Shields, you can download them from a previous post.

We decided to do Pallet Signs

We used Cedar Wood 1x6 6ft planks and Home Depot was nice enough to cut them for us. To make the planks here is what you will need for one Pallet sign:

4 1x6 6 ft cedar planks (we did cedar because it was cheap $1.56 on sale) 

Box of 1 1/4 inch screws

Milk paint (I got mine from hobby lobby using a coupon)

Sponge brush

paint brushes with slanted or straight edge

Parchment paper (for tracing)

craft paint

pencil

To make the pallet as I mentioned I had Home Depot cut the wood in half for us so we had 8 pieces of wood (we wanted the pallets to be 3x3 ft) I took the 6 pieces of wood and lined them up on top of each other against a straight edge on my garage floor. I then took the other two pieces of wood and placed them vertically near the edge of each side, they were a little long, so I did have to use my jigsaw to "nip" the ends off.( make sure you have the best side of the wood facing down, so it is the top piece)  I took the screws and with a drill, drilled the screws into the wood, I used 4 screws per plank on each side. Make sure to keep the pieces tight, they will move on you.

Next up was applying the Milk Paint, I set the Pallet on 2 buckets and put an old tablecloth underneath, I then got several sponge brushes (the wood tears them up) and started applying it in a back and forth motion, be sure to get the sides as well. I didn't paint all the wood, I just used a dry brush technique, I still wanted to see some of the wood coming through.

After it was dry, I then took the pallet into my house (air conditioning!) and placed it on my kitchen table (with another old tablecloth underneath) For the flags we were making (I'll share that next) we had to trace the designs, so I already had the stencils needed to trace the image onto the pallet. I used the corrugated signs we had made for Camp Kickoff for tracing the stencils.

To make the stencils I put tracing paper (my husband is an architect and has special paper they use) but you can use parchment paper as well, over the image needing to be traced. Now because these are 3 ft by 3ft the image needs to be very large. You may have to go to office depot or Costco and have your image printed in large format if you don't have signs made already. Because my image has a shadow in it, I traced just the white portions and then I traced the outline of the shadow. So in the end I had layers, this is important for making the flags as well.

I first traced the circle onto the pallet making sure it was centered, to make the circle I used my cotton candy pan (had to get creative) and then for the inside circle I used a big embroidery hoop I was using as a wreath. Just look around your house, the circles need to big enough to fit your image. I then painted the area between the two circles and let it dry. (this is where a good paint brush comes in handy to get sharp edges)

Next I took my shadow stencils first and placed them within the circle, once I had them in the right places I took my pencil and traced around them. I then took the craft paint color I needed for the pallet and filled in around the tracing. (I did the opposite on the key, it works better doing the shadow first)

After the paint had dried I then placed the white portion of the stencil where it needed to go (lined up correctly, I had to refer to the original a lot!) and traced it. I then took my black craft paint and filled in the space. I didn't fill in the white because I like the look of the milk paint, keeping it rustic.

I then printed off letters from the font Badaboom to add the wards names, I just cut the letters out I needed and traced them onto the pallet and then filled them in with black craft paint. Sorry it's upside down lol! I was taking a quick picture.

We also made signs for our different activities, I was really happy with the way they all turned out!

They were a lot easier then I thought they would be! Now I want to make a whole bunch more for holidays and kids bedrooms!

Superhero Theme Girl's Camp: Cityscape

The first thing we had to get ready for was Camp Kickoff to introduce the camp theme for the year. We decided to have a guest speaker who would speak on the importance of talents and gifts. We had a musical number "Glorious" (originally sung by David Archuleta) and we had our YCL's make a cute video/commercial showing how sometimes we wish we had other peoples talents but it's important to recognize and build our own. Decorating the gym was a big part of our planning. We wanted to be able to use the decorations for Kickoff as well as at camp so we could get the most out of our decorations. We really wanted to do a cityscape big enough for our Amphitheater at camp 10 ft x 15 ft, we tried pricing a banner out and it was way out of budget so we decided to sew it ourselves. Last year I made some cinch backpacks out of some no sew fabric, it's pretty durable, comes in 60" wide and is cheap, we're talking $2.99 a yard but you can use a 40% off coupon! I found it in all different colors at Hobby Lobby. Figured it would be perfect for our cityscape. This is what it looked like

We got 5 yards of blue and 10 yards of black and a little yellow. We made a base of blue and black sewn together,(10 ft high 15 ft wide) we then found a cityscape that we liked and on graphing paper figured out the dimensions for fitting it to our base. We then cut out the buildings in sections (there are 5) We sewed the windows on before attaching the buildings to the base, we did this by pinning them in place and just sewing around the edges. To attach the buildings we hung the base and then pinned them on. We sewed them on just following the edges. (make sure when you are determining the horizon for the buildings you keep it higher then 5 ft, otherwise you will see where you sewed the blue and black base together.)

We then had our Ignite logo printed on banner material and cut it out and sewed it onto the base. We put grommets all around the edges for easy hanging. We hung it up on our stage, it made a great statement as people came in. It did awesome up at camp as well, it held up really well with the wind, we didn't have any rain, but it is rain resistant as well, so we weren't worried if it had. Here's what it looked like up at camp.

It looked amazing in pictures, the girl's used it as a photo booth as well.

Next up were banners, we have used tablecloths in the past for decorating, they are easy to sew and rain resistant so we decided to use them again. We chose bright colors and cut the tablecloths into pennants, we also found some wrapping paper that was polka dotted that we used as well. Make sure to use durable string since you will be using them outside as well. It's worth spending a little more on the thicker table cloths from Zurcher's, we also found the Kapow signs at Zurchers. I just used a stapler to attach the pennants (basically making a casing make sure you put the staple under the string I did 4-5 staples), make sure to staple the bottoms as well to add some extra weight, so they hang straight.

We had our Value shields printed professionally onto plastic corrugated signs, after the fireside we wanted the girls to come into the gym and fill out their permission forms so we set up tables and signs designating where each ward would come to get their camp info. We just got extra table cloths and hung them on the walls (we saved them for another project I will post about) then put the corrugated sign in the middle. We then had a sign saying what ward it was since we were just introducing what ward had what value.

We served sugar cookies with frosting the colors of the values and different flavors of drinks, we called it our "Power aid station" we wrapped boxes in the same colors as the banners and put trays of cookies on top to give dimension and then put different quotes on skewers and pushed them into the boxes so they were standing up. It looked really great! I found the quote bubbles with a quick search on pinterest and added text with photoshop.

We made more decorations for  camp checkout my post for our Flags made out of tablecloths and our Pallet signs.

Super Hero Girl's Camp Theme - Ignite your Power Within :Look Upward, Reach Outward, Press Forward

This year for Stake Girl's Camp the Young Women of our stake decided they wanted to do a Super Hero theme, but we didn't want to go with the usual super heroes, we wanted the girls to be the heroes. Our theme was "Ignite your power within" we wanted to focus on the girls spiritual and physical talents to help them see that it is ok to be themselves! We also wanted to focus on how the girls can use Heavenly Father's powers (scriptures, prayer, atonement etc..) to strengthen their own. Our scripture was Moroni 10: 7-8, we also had themes for each day of camp which were: Look Upward (Look to Heavenly Father for guidance) Reach Outward (use your talents to help others) Press Forward (The Savior can help you keep moving forward), like how superman has his "up, up and away" ours was "Look upward, Reach outward, Press forward!" We have 8 wards in our stake so thought it would be perfect to assign each of the wards a Young Woman's Value that they could concentrate on in their own camp. We asked a talented woman, Jenny Smith,  in our stake if she would create a value shield for each of them, this is what she came up with: (she has given permission to share these)

Aren't they amazing!! These were the basis for all our decorations! Click on each value for the artwork:

                                              

Hope this helps you in your planning! You could also use it for New Beginnings or Young Women in Excellence. I have been so grateful for others who have been willing to share their work in the past I thought it would be nice to pay it forward. I'll be showing how we used these for decorations and other camp ideas in following posts. Look for our "Sky High" activity, Bishop's Assemble,  Camp Kickoff, Crafts and Music/Skits as well as other Camp planning helps in the next posts.