Vacation Bible School snacks

Mostly for my records and memory.  If I ever do this again.  I did not take a picture of everything.  Serving 250 kids everyday takes a lot more work than I was expecting.  Mostly because the big groups are really large.

Monday: Family Boats
These were shredded wheat boats with teddy grahams for each member of the kids' family.  The boat went into blue milk for the first group.  We decided that was too messy so the rest of the groups just ate their boats with teddies and drank their milk without mixing the two.
The boats were a lot of work to make and probably not worth it since we did not end up using them as boats.  If I were to do this again, I would just do "flat" boats.





Tuesday: Friend Faces
These were pretty simple to put together.  We put all of the stuff on a plate for the kids to makes faces with, and spooned out sauce to those that would take it.  We just had a juice for them to drink.  It is actually a lot of work to put together the place and drinks, and then put them out for the kids before they come into the room.  I did not realize what that would take.







Wednesday: Rocky Road & Green Guzzler Drink
We put together plates and took off the tops of the pudding cups.  The drinks involved scooping out sherbet and adding lemonade and sprinkles on top. 
I would split these two up next time.  The drink would have been great to go with the butterfly which was put together at the house prior to.  Scooping took longer than I expected




Thursday: Butterflies, made of fruit and cheese
These were actually a lot of work, but the work was done at the house so the day of serving was easy.  The cheese was bought as a block and the grapes and strawberries needed to be sliced as well.  It was probably more work making sure there were some for each kind of allergy present.







Friday: Cross Dippers and S'more Cups
I did not catch a picture of either of these.  The crosses were made of the refrigerated bread and we had some dipping sauce for them.  The bread had to be sliced in half and then the cross was made and baked in the oven.  It was probably hardest to get the oven to work.  After that it went fast, just kept someone in the kitchen cooking the whole time since we were slow to get the oven working.
The s'more cups were just golden graham type cereal, mini marshmallows, and chocolate chips mixed together and put into a bowl.  Easy, but would have been better to mix and put into a snack bag while at the house since we had the bread cross cooking in the kitchen.

Melted Crayon Art

I had this idea in my mind for a while now.  I finally had an occasion to do it and it turned out well.  I have read and seen how not everyone's ended up as nice as all those others.  I'm glad that was not the case for me.  I used a very small travel hair dryer since that is all I have.  The heat was enough and all I had to do was make the wax go down.  Not all of the crayons melted well, but they still turned out working just fine. 

 

I did it all after the kids went to bed and I was done cleaning the day away.  I don't stay up too late so it probably took somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour for everything, including cutting and tearing the crayon paper off.

 

I wanted a picture of the man and woman to be in the crayon wax so I cut out what I wanted and glued that down before melting the crayons.  Then most of the wax went around the image and I was able to easily glue a clean image on top for the look I was going for.  It took a bit more hot glue than I thought to keep all of the crayons in place.  I also only used half crayons above the silhouette because I wanted to minimize the amount of wax in that area.  As you can see later it didn't really seem to matter much.

 

I put the canvas in a paper bag when melting the wax.  I just wasn't sure how messy it would be.  It did end up going over the sides and bottom so I was glad I put the whole thing in a bag since I was working inside.  I am sure that keeping the blow dryer aimed straight down the whole time would have kept it from going over the sides as much.

 

 

This is what I looked like when I finally stopped heating it up.  I could have melted a lot more of the wax but was happy with the look at that point.

 

Then I put a white cutout of the silhouette over the green so it would really look how I wanted it to.  All in all I was happy with my first go of it.  If I ever do it again I will probably make sure to melt all of the crayons more because it would probably be a better finished look.

From Wedding to Baptism: Using a wedding dress

So way back when I was planning the wedding, I read one of those bride magazines.  It was really the only one that I read because I am not the sort to read that stuff.  Anyway, I read the idea of using your wedding dress as your child's baptism (christening) outfit.  I decided at that point that if we were blessed with a child, this is what I would be doing with my dress.  Of course I did not really think it would happen, so I went ahead and did the antiquing thing with the dress.  Now, five years later, we have three kiddos and each of them had a special outfit for their special day.

This is my wedding dress, although mine was champagne instead of green.

My mom made the outfits for me.  I am still not a seamstress with talent for more than simple stitches.  I picked out the pattern I liked, and she started cutting up the dress for a boy and a girl outfit (we did not find out the sex with the first). 

This is a headband made with material from the dress as well.

 

Then the second was another girl so she had to get creative with a second girls dress.  The top and underlining are just a white cotton material.  The sleeves and top layer of the dress are from the wedding dress.

Then we had a boy and she put together the material cut from the first one. 

 

Now all of the dress has been used, and each child has something that hopefully will be passed down unlike the wedding dress.