Love Notes

Sometimes life happens and the plans you have change.

 

This seems to be especially true when it comes to my calling in young women's. I usually meet with my presidency once every quarter. We also have a Facebook page where we keep each other up to date on everything else. It is super convenient and I don't have to feel like we are having meetings just to have meetings. So when we do meet, we plan a ton and then divvy out who will be in charge of what activity. It works great! But sometimes life comes and throws a quick pot hole in the road and you have to be flexible.

 

I was recently in charge of an activity where I would be teaching the girls to correctly lead music and then we would make some cute scarves as a reward. It was all set. And then Savanah woke up with a fever that morning and my husband was away for training. I frantically began texting all my leaders to figure out who could take over for me that night. Sadly, none of them knew how to really lead or sew for that matter. It was obvious that we would need a Plan B. I did a quick scan of Pinterest and found an idea that I was able to modify to fit our time restraint.

 

It just so happened that this activity was the during the week of Valentine's Day. I ran out to the Dollar Store and grabbed some cute, plastic buckets and some fun ribbon. I then made a quick sticker using Picmonkey and printed them out on printable shipping label sheets.

The idea was for the girls to each decorate a bucket with the ribbon and stickers to hold their "love notes". They then used scrapbooking supplies to make several cards that they could send to people who might need a little extra love. The girls could continue to add extra cards all year long to their buckets and use them as a reminder to do small acts of kindness for others.

 

Not too bad for a Plan B!

Purpose of Life Handout

As I mentioned in a previous post, we are expecting! Yea for babies, right? But I have definitely not been feeling "yea" with this pregnancy. It started with the "sickies" and then went straight to the "no energy to post anything". I have been crafting up a storm, but just have not gotten around to posting about them. That all changes today. I guess I am blog nesting.

 

I have been serving as our church's Young Women's president for a little over a year now. I absolutely LOVE the program and being with the girls. It is quite a nice change of pace from being with elementary school kids all the time. The new curriculum that was introduced in 2013 is awesome. I love the extra leniency when I am planning a lesson. And I really love finding cute things for the girls to add to their journals (more on those later!).

 

This month's theme is the Plan of Salvation. I taught a quick lesson on the plan and then switched to the purpose of life. I was really struggling to find a cute handout for the end of my lesson, and Sugar Doodle was down all last week. What?

 

I finally stumbled across this handout on Pinterest. 

I love President Utchdorf, so it was perfect! I then remembered seeing these little hamburgers all over Pinterest and thought they would be so cute to give out along side my handout. 

They are so adorable and come together in absolutely no time at all.

 

Quick directions:

1. Mix a few drops of green food coloring into a small bag of coconut. Shake well.

2. In three separate bowls, mix frosting with red, yellow, and green food coloring. I used butter cream frosting from a container.

3. Smear red and yellow frosting to flat side of vanilla wafer.

4. Place York peppermint patty on top of frosting.

5. Smear green frosting on top of peppermint patty.

6. Push a bit of coconut onto green frosting.

7. Smear more green frosting to the flat side of another vanilla wafer and top off your burger.

 

Now make about 50 because they are so easy and they look so darn cute all lined up together!

Picmonkey Handouts

 

If you haven't tried Picmonkey yet, you totally need to. I use it all the time to edit photos and create fun handouts for my YW. You can totally pay for the complete version, but I find the free version suits all my needs just fine.

 

I created this cute handout to go with one of my lessons. The great thing is that it is totally interchangeable. Just swap out virtue for whatever other word you want.

 

To create this handout, I googled "water" under images and found one I liked. Save the image to your computer. Open the image on the Picmonkey website and click the add text button. I found a "creepy-ish" looking free font and began adding my text. Once I had it the way I wanted it, I changed the blend modes from normal to overlay to give it that see through look. 

 

The best part was finding Bruce (the shark from Finding Nemo) Pez dispensers on clearance to attach the handout to. They turned out adorable and the girls loved them.



Simple Nail Polish Handout

I have mentioned before that I teach the 12-18 year old girls at church. We decided to divide our teaching responsibilities into months instead of weeks this year. That way we get all our teaching done at one time and don't have to worry about it for another three months.

 

Since September is one of my months, I am currently in full swing. The first week of the month is always a fast Sunday in the LDS church, and so handing out treats would be torture for everyone! I try to come up with something that isn't edible.

 

While at Joann's I came across a three pack of little nail polishes for only 50 cents. I snatched up all they had and knew I could do something with them. 

 

It didn't take long for something to pop into my head and with the help of picmonkey I got to work.

The best part is that you could easily change out the "testimony of fasting and tithing" part for anything else.

 

Simple and cute. And what girl wouldn't love a new nail polish?