More Graduation Decorations

Hello! As promised, a few more graduation decorations:

I love using vintage bingo cards in craft projects. For this project, I painted a bingo card, then constructed the graduate figure using art paper scraps. The Klutz Press books Paper Fashions and Paper Fashions Fancy (both dirt-cheap thrift store finds) were the sources for the stencils I used. There wasn't actually a graduation gown stencil, of course, so I just adapted a dress stencil and cut paper bits to make the cap (green crochet cotton for the tassel).

The numbers "20" and "13" were cut from the board that came with the same set of bingo cards (the board was used to keep track of which numbers had been drawn). These numbers were already green, so they are perfect for our green/black color scheme. 

An addition to the tabletop feather tree:

This vintage Hallmark decoration is about 5 1/2" high. I'm not sure where it came from, but I'm thinking it had something to do with a graduation of my husband's - either 8th grade (early 1970's) or high school (1976). Yeah, I know it's a male figure and we have a daughter, but I couldn't resist using it. If our daughter protests I'll remove it or else add some paper "hair" to make it look like a girl. 

Got this last night and put it on the feather tree:

We attended a picnic hosted by the local alumni club for Michigan State, the school our daughter will soon be attending. The above buttons were passed out there. As alumni ourselves, we were happy to take them!

Besides fellowship and good food, the picnic was an opportunity to ask questions of various school representatives. The beloved school mascot, Sparty, was on hand as well to ramp up some school spirit. 

And just for fun, there were door prizes to be won by answering various questions about Michigan State. Some questions were student-only while others were for the parents to answer. 

My husband, our daughter and myself each won door prizes; aren't we smart? We answered the following questions:

1. A student question: before the MSU teams became the Spartans, what were they called?

2. Alumni question: what is the name of the campus building where students go to look for jobs?

3. Alumni question: what is the name of the alma mater song?

Give up? The answers are:

1. The Aggies
2. Student Services Building
3. MSU Shadows (in case you were wondering, this is the question I answered, though I'm sure I wasn't the only one who knew the answer).

For our efforts, we came home with two MSU t-shirts and one MSU umbrella.

It was a nice time and we appreciated the effort made by the local alumni club. As I told one of the picnic organizers, there were no such picnics to welcome us to MSU when my husband and I were incoming freshmen. I'm glad that more is being done on the behalf of freshmen today!