Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Look up! Stake Relief Society Women's Conference {hot air balloon theme}

This past weekend I had the opportunity to decorate for our Stake Women's Conference.  I was told that the theme was "Look Up" and that I needed to decorate for 28 tables. 
When people walked into the building, I had a display table in the doorway with clouds hanging above it, a hot air balloon on the table...
and this printable that I bought from Paper Canoe Printables on Etsy.  
I changed the colors of the printable to match the color scheme I had picked out for the conference and I changed the text on the picture.

When you walked into the gym and "looked up" you saw over 100 tissue paper pompom clouds hanging from the ceiling.... actually, they weren't hanging from the ceiling.  The ceilings in our church are really high.  In order to hang them, I had to string fishing line across the gym from the ledge.  Then, we hung the clouds from the fishing line.  The pompoms were made using a tutorial similar to this one.
In the center of each table was a hot air balloon.
To make these, I started with strawberry baskets from Orchard Valley Supply Co.  (no specific reason why I bought them from there... they were cheap and I didn't have to order more than 50.  However, the shipping cost more than the baskets and I wasn't thrilled with that.) I hot glued 18" wooden dowels in the corners of the basket.  Then I tied baker's twine from Pick Your Plum to the top of the wooden dowels.  The first row of twine was tight to hold the lantern in place.  The 2nd and 3rd rows were draping.  Then I embellished with ribbon, paper flowers, etc.  I also put some sort of trim around the basket.  My amazing mother in law made the flower arrangements in the baskets (all flowers were purchased from The Dollar Tree).  To top them off, we put 12" paper lanterns from the Paper Lantern Store.  I did not glue the lanterns on so that they would come apart easily for storage.
This is what the tables looked like all set.
Here are a couple of pictures of the overall look of the gym.
I couldn't not have a banner... I just have to have banners.  So, we put a corkboard behind the podium to attach the banner to.

And here is a close-up view of the simple banner I made using my Silhouette Cameo.
This was a big project... but a lot of fun.  I had some awesome friends that helped me.  My mother-in-law was the biggest help!  And she is super talented!!!