The “Keep Calm” craft idea is really popular right now, and for good reason! We all need some calmness in our lives.
I love this girls camp craft or just general YW craft!
The “Keep Calm” trend can be a marvelous teaching opportunity for young women leaders. It’s always easy for the young women to listen to you if you’re relating things to their everyday life, and this concept relates to their lives AND is a popular phrase right now. You can’t get much more relate-able than that. Yay!
There are several ways to use a craft like this for Young Women’s: it could be a Girls Camp craft, a regular Young Women’s activity craft and more. Even Primary girls could do this one.
Ideas and directions below….
Ideas
1. If you want to incorporate a theme with this craft, you could try something like, “Keep Calm and Stand” or “Keep Calm and Don’t Move”. For the “Don’t Move” plaque, you could use President Packer’s talk about the crocodiles and how his tour guide told him not to go closer. You could relate that to how we need to be in holy places and not be moved toward dangerous mistakes.
2. If you want to stress a particular characteristic or value one month, a great YW activity could be to make these plaques but change the wording to fit the value. For example, if you are working on faith, the plaque could say “Keep Calm and Have Faith”. I’m sure you can come up with great ideas for that.
3. This craft could also be incorporated into any girls camp theme. For example, our Girls Camp theme one year had to do with STARs (Stand Tall and Righteous), so we could have done “Keep Calm and Reach for the Stars” or “Keep Calm and Be a Star”.
Directions
1. Have someone cut and route the wood for you. Almost anyone who does a teeny bit of woodworking will have a router, and cutting rectangles will be easy for them. (You could also learn how to do it, if you do these types of crafts a lot–working with routers is fun and there are tons of attachments to do different edge shapes.) Also ask them to drill the two holes at the top for easy hanging, if you plan to hang it.
2. Paint the wood and allow to dry.
3. Using sandpaper, lightly distress the wood until you get the worn look you prefer. People often especially distress the edges of the wood, so you may want to do that. It’s up to you and the look you want! Make sure you remove any remaining dust with a damp cloth before continuing.
3. On the clean, dry, distressed wood, apply the vinyl crown and lettering. If you are a perfectionist or nervous about getting it right, you can do a test run before removing the paper backing from the vinyl.
*Alternatively, you can skip the vinyl and just use stencils to get your crown and letters on the wood. In that case, you may want to give a quick read to these instructions for that process.
4. Insert the ribbon through the top holes of the plaque and tie into a bow.
I hope you have fun doing this great craft. Whether you use it for Girls Camp, YW, or a Primary activity, it’s a fabulous reinforcer for what you are teaching the girls.
ChurchofJesusChristYoungWomen.com
