Mother's Day Project and Finishing a Journey!

We have our last "classroom" meeting of the school year tonight. The girls will be finishing their second journey, "Between Earth and Sky" and receiving their journey patches.

I am excited about our Mother's Day craft tonight. I had bought some old teacup and saucer sets when the service unit was trying to decide what to do for Thinking Day. We ended up not using them and that left me with 9 sets to find a use for. I also have left over GS cookies my troop paid for to use up, so I'm throwing them into the mix. I decided to try making teacup bouquets with the girls.

You will need:
Teacups/Saucers -- they don't have to match
Hot Glue Gun
Styrofoam Balls cut in half -- use a bread knife
Coffee Filters
Spray Bottle of Water
Washable Markers
Plastic Cling Wrap
Popsicle sticks
Cookies
Lollipops

The only prep work that is necessary before your meeting would be to cut the Styrofoam balls in half and to hot glue the cups to the saucers.

To start, give each girl a coffee filter (I have a huge package I got at the dollar store), flatten it out and have them each color a design around the outside edge. Now this is where I recommend having a second adult on hand. If you have a spritz or spray bottle you can just mist the coffee filters with water, it will make the markers run and look very pretty. They dry pretty fast. If you don't have a spray bottle, the girls can lightly flick water drops onto the filter to get the colors to run. This should be done on a paper towel to save the work surface and extra hands can help dab off extra water to speed drying.

I then placed the coffee filter into the teacup, trying to leave a little bit out. Place one of the halved Styrofoam balls into the cup. Depending on the size of the cup and the size of the Styrofoam balls, you may have to put it in dome-up or dome-down. I don't think it really matters which. Press it firmly down in, the coffee filter should create a kind of ruffle around the opening of the teacup.

The next step was to stick the lollipops and cookies in as the "flowers." The lollipops don't need anything done to them but the cookies do. I used 1 cookie with a Popsicle stick and then wrapped it tightly in plastic cling wrap. I considered tearing the cling wrap in advance but then I realized I'd have a huge mess on my hands, so I'm going to draft one of the troop volunteers to tear them off and keep them orderly.

After putting all the "flowers" into my bouquet I was done! It was a fun and easy craft and I hope the girls will really have fun with it. I have a lot of cookies for them to use if they want so the bouquets can be much fuller than the one I have pictured here. The best part is, if the girls want a treat tonight, we'll have cookies on hand!