Tackle It Tuesday

This coming Saturday is our Cub Scout Pack's Blue & Gold banquet. One of my responsibilities for the banquet is the decorations. The theme for the banquet this year is "Season Opener." So, my challenge was to come up with baseball themed decorations. One item that I wanted to include in the decorations was some type of table favor. Of course, being a not-for-profit organization money is always a consideration, so I knew that favors would have to be inexpensive.

After searching the web this is what I came up with.

On a website called DLTK-Kids I found this "Benny the Baseball Sports Buddy." You can find it at www.dltk-kids.com/sports/pbaseballbuddy.asp.

The website allows you to print the templates to make your own "Benny" in either color or black and white. I choose black and white so that I could color it blue and gold to match our banquet theme.

Before I could color my baseball player I had cut out all of the template pieces, glue them together, and take the finished product to our local office supply store to have them copy and shrink it to fit on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. The actual finished project as printed from the website is much larger. Since I knew I was going to need 150 of these for our banquet, I wanted it to fit on a standard size piece of paper for copying.

My next step was to color "Benny" in the colors that would compliment our banquet. In this case, Cub Scout Blue & Gold. I choose crayons as my medium for coloring, but you could also use markers or paint. After I had my baseball player all colored, I took him back to the office supply store to have him copied onto card stock. I choose card stock, because I wanted him to stand at each place on the tables at the banquet.

Here is the finished project. After having copies made, I brought them home to cut out (150 copies, that is a lot of cutting! I did have help, thank-goodness!). Next we turned them into paper dolls. The little stand piece at the bottom was our own invention. We used old shirt boxes, cut them into rectangles, cut a slit in the top and slide it onto our finished "Benny."

It was a much more time consuming project than I had hoped for, but hopefully they will make a fun, themed addition to our Blue & Gold banquet!