Christmas Shepherds

It seems the job of organising the decorating for Christmas at church has fallen to our small group.  Thankfully others are helping but we are doing a lot of it.  I volunteered for one corner in the main room and the room that the children meet in (although the idea for that room came from someone else, I am actioning it).

The corner of the main room that I am decorating is where we have our nursery corner.  We do have a separate nursery room, but we have this corner as well, so that parents can keep their young children occupied and still be in the meeting.

First of all I took down the one piece of art work that was on the main wall in that area, and began covering the painted brick wall with frieze paper.

Once that was done I fetched an Overhead Projector and brought out the images I had printed onto OHP sheets the day before.

I pencilled in all the lines onto the paper.  This wasn't easy as the sun coming through that window was very bright and making it difficult to see where the lines were.  I had to put myself between the sunlight and whatever particular part of the paper I was working on.  That, of course, meant I sometimes got in the way of the light from the projector.  But eventually I got it done.

You can tell how bright the sun was by how difficult it is to make out the pencil marks in the above photo.

I used children's colouring pages from the internet for the images, and put bits from a number of pictures together to make my final image.  I couldn't resist this sheep and had to include it, a number of times in fact.  I even had one peeping out from behind the shepherd's robes.

I grabbed paint and brushes from the children's ministry supply cupboard and got to work going over those lines with the smallest brush I could find.

I only had that sheep printed on the OHP sheets once.  I moved the projector around to get the sheep smaller, and flipped it over to make the other one face in the opposite direction.

Finally that wall was finished with the outlines and I turned my attention to the windows.  I had found a fantastic colouring picture with shepherds looking in over a stable door or dividing wall.  I couldn't resist using that on the windows.

And this is how I have left it for now.  I had originally planned to colour them in as well, but now I am thinking that maybe just one or two pieces, such as the belt, hat, etc.  Also, I can't decode whether to cut the excess backing paper away on the windows.  I had planned to but I am worried about how narrow that crook is and whether it would get ripped if it was cut to the lines.  If I don't do that then I will cover the rest of the window with paper.

We're also planning on putting a star up in the other window panel, above the shepherds looking in.

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