Pink & Pearl Baptism Party Banner

So our sweet girl was baptized & we had our amazing friends & family over to celebrate after the service.  I wanted to keep this simple, but that is pretty difficult for me.  I wanted to at least keep the theme simple, so I went with pink & pearls with a little lace thrown in.  I am Southern, so I have pearls a plenty.  I didn't have to do a whole lot of purchasing in that department.  The first project that I tackled was making the banner.  I had this pack of 18 round doilies that I had bought at the Dollar Tree for $1.  I had bought them for another party & just never used them.  So I decided I would use them as the base for my banner. 

I went to my craft drawers & searched until I found as many light pink pieces of scrapbook paper that I had left from my other parties.  We were in project "pay off credit card" mode at this point, so I really wanted to save money where I could, even if scrapbook paper is only like 40-60 cents a piece.  Luckily, I save all of my scrapbook "scraps" from leftover projects & had just enough to cut out the circles that I needed.  I have a Martha Stewart circle cutter & let me tell you, that thing is no joke.  When I first got it, I wanted to see how well it worked.  Well, I missed the part where it said to use some sort of glass cutting board (sold separately of course).  So I stacked up some file folders & the paper I wanted to cut & cut a circle...through the paper, through the file folders & into my desk.  Whoops.  Luckily a furniture stain pen helped the desk out, but lesson learned.  I still haven't bought the special board & just use my cutting boards.  Anyway, I used the biggest setting & cut out 6 inch circles. 

Something I did purchase especially for this party (mostly because I found a 40% Michael coupon & wanted to put it to good use) was the Martha Stewart Circle Edge Punch Starter Kit.  This included a doily punch cartridge, which I thought would be perfect.  Now here is where I ran into a small problem.  My circle cutter cuts circles up to 6 inches in diameter.  My circle edge punch starts at 6 inch circles & bigger.  So my circles were pretty close & some of the edges as you can see in this bottom picture didn't turn out perfect.  However, hanging up on the wall, you couldn't really tell that much. 

Look how cool this thing is.  You literally punch & then rotate it to the next spot & punch again, all the way around.

Once I had all of my circles punched, I glued them to my Dollar Tree doilies & started working on the letters.  I used the same letter stencils that I used to make the Bee party banners & traced out "God Bless Addy". 

I had some adhesive pearls leftover from a baby shower that I will post about soon & so I used those to decorate around the letters.  I strung the letters together using the clear cord that I used for the Baby Mobile and that I use to hang the other party banners, paper fans, etc.   I'm telling you, the stuff is great & so multi-functional.

I do mock set-ups of my parties.  Here is the backdrop set up in my dining room to make sure that everything would be positioned in the right place.  What did I tell you?  I'm so OCD.  : ) 

Here is a shot of the banner hanging in the tent.  I hung this up in the tent the same way I strung the letters together, by using my clear cord & tying up the edges to the top of the tent rails.  It was a little windy that day, so I also took some shipping tape, rolled it up & stuck each individual letter to the backdrop to keep it a little more secure. 

And a picture of the whole table.  You can see more about the Pink & Pearl Baptism Party Food Table & Decorations here. : )