Made It: Even More Graduation Decorations

Hello! Can you stand seeing a couple more handmade graduation decorations from me? 

To greet our Open House attendees:

A green, black and white windsock - green fabric top with assorted green, black and white trims swaying in the breeze. I used whatever I had on hand: ribbons, vintage and new rickrack and vintage seam binding.

This project is based on this:

Its directions had come from a women's magazine. 

But the following project was my own:

I made two sets of three, which I've hung up from a rack I'd already made and have hanging in our dining room. The altered bingo card I'd shown off in a previous post hangs from the middle of the rack with the two sets of hanging "graduation caps" on either side of it. 

This was easy to do, though of course it helped that I had the components already on hand. I began by selecting a graduation cap stencil (from a thrift store purchase of several dozen scrapbooking stencil shapes), which I traced onto pages of a vintage dictionary. 

Not just any pages, though - I zeroed in on words (with their definitions) of relevance to the occasion, picking "black", "river" and "rat" for the grouping seen above. The other set has "high school", "salutatorian" and "graduate". 

After tracing and cutting out each "cap", I then looked for paper scraps in the school colors. Would you believe I found the colors I needed - in sizes that didn't need any trimming? So it was just a matter of gluing the caps onto black paper and affixing the black paper to the green. Punched holes at the top and used green crochet cotton for hangers. 

A close-up of a couple of the "caps":

I wanted to show off this idea since it can be readily adapted to other occasions and projects. For instance, with a heart-shaped stencil, a dictionary word pertaining to love, affection, friendship, etc., red or pink paper: a Valentine's Day card. Or a baby rattle stencil, pink or blue paper, and words related to babies for a baby shower theme. 

Our daughter liked the latest batch of decorations. The only thing she hasn't liked so far was the idea I had for a cooler to keep pops chilled at the open house. Oh, well, I was bound to mess up at least once!