My ward always picks to best themes for Young Women in Excellence & New Beginnings. They tend to lean a bit to the secular side, but then the spiritual metaphors are awesome! This year our Young Women President was inspired by the Award Show theme idea from Lolly Jane. The laurel class was responsible for organizing the program, and we all loved the idea! Our amazing Young Women Presidency was super on the ball, even after they were reorganized two weeks before the program. I was responsible for the invitations, and that's about it! I also helped with music and decorations, but there were no super-stressful assignments.
There were a couple awkward moments, like being escorted down the red carpet by the young men, with the tallest and the smallest of each gender being paired with each other, and tripping over the weirdly placed spotlights--but overall it was great. After the hymn and Young Women Theme, our Young Women President gave an awesome talk about how we're the actors and directors of our own lives, and how Personal Progress helps us in that. We went in order of value, having each young woman get up and give her "acceptance speech" describing her project. Then their parents would get up and talk about how great their daughter was and present them with an award (each with a creative title) and then they would receive their "Moroni Award", which was a vase with an Angel Moroni decal.
Because we had 20 young women, we didn't have anything else in the program, but that's as it should have been: focusing on the young women's individual personal progress. At the "after party" we had low-key, elegant refreshments and casual conversation. It was a little sad thinking it was my last Young Women in Excellence as a young woman, after reminiscing about what I'd done over the years, but it was definitely a high note to end on.
I had a lot of fun playing with the designs I used for the invitations and decorations. I didn't actually tell anybody that I'd had these designs since May, when the theme was first brought up. I tweaked them quite a bit when the time actually came for the event, but the basic idea of channeling the Oscar's logo with the Angel Moroni stayed the same.
First off I have my invitations. They were really fun, and also surprisingly challenging to create, since I was playing with fairly new software I wasn't familiar with yet. The final product is something I'm pretty proud of. Customized invitations are available in my Etsy store.
Next, I have the red carpet backdrop, in gold and red. We had about 10 of them printed normal-sized and pinned up against a room divider which was used as our stage backdrop as well. These come as a PDF.
I also have two Angel Moroni images. One is just the straight up Angel Moroni, and the other is the Angel Moroni superimposed on the triangle, channeling the Oscar's logo. These can be used as stencils for tracing, or even used as additional backdrop images. They're also capable of being blown up fairly large, so they could be made into life-size cutouts if one had the budget for that! These come in a PDF.
One of my favorite creations is this blank movie theater marquee. This is super versatile! Initially we were going to have the names and projects of each girl put on the marquee and have them projected up behind them. We ended up not being coordinated enough to pull that off, but that doesn't mean they can't be useful! They could be used as door signs, posters, projections, food labels, gift tags, or even the invitations themselves (though I'd personally suggest my invitations)! This comes as a PDF and a JPG. Text can't be added to the PDF (sorry!) but a JPG could be opened in Word or Powerpoint and have a text box added over it.
Lastly, I have a Young Women Theme print to match everything else. It uses elements of the marquee, and adds a little splash of color to the otherwise dominantly Gryffindor color scheme. It's an 8x10 (or 8.5x11) which is available in my Etsy store.
Free files can be downloaded here!
Labels: Young Women in Excellence
