Decorating Spaces - Snowflakes

When I worked in the children's room at our public library we changed up the decorations with the seasons. Leaves for fall, snow for winter, and flowers and raindrops for spring. So I utilized the idea in our kidmin space at church.

We did stars in December to go along with the Christmas lessons and kept them up until after Epiphany. In the spring, we did butterflies and dragon flies and let the children color them. When we took them down, I sent the ones they had colored home with them.

If you have a suspended ceiling in your space, this is really easy to do. Just use a paperclip or binder clips to attach fish line to the metal grids between the ceiling tiles. It is a little tedious to punch holes in each item, cut the line, thread it through and knot it. I make little loops on the end that will go around the paper clip. If you use binder clips, you don't even need to make a loop at the one end of the fish line, just clip it to the grid. When using paper clips, I always used white ones so they blended in with the tiles.

Why decorate for the seasons? Kids notice it, and so do parents. It says to me that you care enough about the children coming that you want to make their space special. I didn't always do this, but whenever I did, the children loved it. You can watch the video below to see what we did.

If you are interested in learning how we decorated our walls in the J.A.M. Center, you can read about it in several posts. You can link to several sites that provide the materials to draw the designs in my post DIY Theming That Doesn't Look Like You Did it Yourself. 


Snowflakes from Joan Eppehimer on Vimeo.

Live On Location - VBS

Watch this short interview with Amy Livingston to learn more about the effect of event decorating.

Catch a few of our VBS decorations in the video below. I heard dads go "Wow, this is cool." when they walked through my favorite room filmed below. I expect that from moms, but to hear dads say it meant were really making an impression.

You can see some of the other decorations we made for this VBS here and here and here.

Stressing and Obsessing with VBS Decorating

To decorate or not to decorate, or maybe the real question should be, "Just how much should we decorate our church for VBS?"

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Let's start with asking why we decorate in the first place. I think we decorate for VBS for the same reasons that we theme our children's areas or church platforms. It creates a "wow" effect. It makes VBS feel like something special. And it sends a message that you cared enough to make the place special for your VBS guests. That "wow" effect makes a very good first impression - so it is important.

So how much decoration does it take to get that message out? Only you and your team can decide that. I just want to give you some ideas for getting the most bang for your buck in this post.

Sanctuaries take a lot of work to make an impact. We share our decorations with another church. This year they made these big coral reefs for on the platform. We had jelly fish hanging from the lights and cardboard water bubbles on the walls.

The short video below shows what we did in a small walk through room and in our craft room. We covered both in blue. For about $70 you can buy a 1000 foot roll of colored paper. We used less than 1/2 of it to cover our craft room. In the smaller room we used blue plastic which had been used 2 years running. We added some Dollar Store plastic tablecloths.

Ocean Commotion Decoration Part 2

I found some more pictures from week 1 of Ocean Commotion VBS.

This treasure chest was for the kids to put their offering in. There was one for the boys and one for the girls. They were made from Styrofoam coolers. Another Pinterest project.

VBS Week 1 always includes a photo op for kids.

The platform decor used insulation panels. The back panels were painted to look like the bottom of the ocean. These coral panels in front were also painted onto insulation panels.

This is church number 2 where Ocean Commotion will take place. We decided to cover the murals with blue paper to make underwater scenes. You can buy a 1000 foot roll for about $70. We covered all the walls and have lots left. The paper is 3 feet wide and our ceilings are 9 feet high, so it is a perfect fit (sort of!).

Decorating for VBS

Recently our church had the opportunity to be involved in a collaborative VBS. We partnered with two other churches. The VBS was actually held twice, once at the “mother” church and then again at our church a month later. 

We moved all of the decorations down to our church and

Reusing Roll Paper

This is truly a Kidfrugal post. What I mean by that is this post is about one of the best purchases I ever made. We got a lot of mileage out of it.

A few years ago, our VBS called for making a road – so I bought a roll of black paper with 1000 feet. Here are some of the things we have done with the paper.

Race track on the floor: we used white duct tape to make the lines on the road.

I literally re-used the same

Don’t Be a Wallflower – Make a Wall-Tree Instead!

I love this tree because it is 3D AND you can make it from used paper.

 If you have brown or black paper that you have used for a bulletin board background or for anything else, it can be repurposed for this tree. Because the paper gets twisted it doesn’t matter if it is wrinkled or messed up a little. You can even upcycle the brown packing paper that some companies stuff their boxes with to make this tree.