It’s the beginning of the Adventurer year in my club, and my bulletin board is in desperate need of an update! The logos from my conference for our year’s theme have arrived, and they are so beautiful and inspiring, that I knew I had to base my bulletin board off of them. Just in case other people are looking for bulletin board ideas, I’m sharing my board with you. The printables and cut files are at the end of this post.
Printing and Preparing
Since bulletin boards come in a variety of sizes, I have created these letters and borders in three sizes. My club is blessed with a very long board in the hallway in our church basement. I have used the large size – each letter prints on one 8 1/2 x 11 page. The medium size kit has two letters per page and the small size has four letters per page. I used my Silhouette cutting machine to cut everything out, but everything can be cut with scissors or a craft knife.
I printed everything on cardstock and laminated it as I want it to last all year. Laminating is optional, of course. I just really like melting plastic to paper!
For the background, I purchased felt by the yard a few years ago. It still looks great and doesn’t show holes like bulletin board paper. It was challenging to hang as I attempted to use a random stapler at the church to staple it up. I’ve since solved that issue, and the ongoing issue of stapling anything to the board by buying a small stapler gun. With the correct tool, the board goes up fairly quickly. (At least in comparison!) I do make sure to keep this stapler on a high shelf out of the reach of our little adventurers.
Borders
These borders are designed to print borderless, but I found I had better success printing without using the borderless setting – the three borders were more likely to be sized the same. I’m not quite sure what’s going on with my printer, but I wanted to give you a warning just in case it’s not just my printer acting up. As I needed to trim the lamination anyway, trimming the ends wasn’t any additional work.
I taped the ends of each border piece together before stapling it to the bulletin board. If you have a large bulletin board like mine, I’d recommend a helper or two. Fortunately, I had a helpful Eager Beaver shadowing me the day I put up my lower border, and two helpful Pathfinders were happy to be pressed into service the next day to finish the job!
Tips for Your Bulletin Board
I used painters tape to position the letters and the little pieces. It took a few tries to the letters centered and spaced properly. (I don’t know that I’d recommend this method on a bulletin board lined with paper..) Once everything was just so, I used my nifty stapler for some semi-permanence.
I like to decorate my bulletin board at the beginning of the year, and then kinda ignore it until I have something to add – pictures of the kids, announcements, things like that. So I want the board to look “finished” but there also must be space for me to add things without messing it up or having to rearrange everything. When I put up pictures in a few months, they might go right over some of my “filler”! This keeps the board easy to maintain.
Artists
My chatting Adventurer and Pathfinder are not in the download below. If you’d like to add them to your bulletin board, you can find them at Traços de Esperança (Traces of Hope) along with a crew of friends. @urias_arts is a talented Adventist graphic designer from Brazil who makes wonderful graphics for our Adventurer and Pathfinder clubs. I adore his work and love using his characters in many of my projects for Adventurers and Pathfinders.
The original logo, that inspired this set of printables, and the graphics in the letters and borders were created by the endlessly creative Vanesa Franco, a fellow Area Coordinator in the Oregon Conference. The Transformed Logos are available from the Oregon Conference.
PDFs
Cut Files
Does your club have a bulletin board? How are you decorating it this year? Please leave a comment and tell us about it. We are all looking for new ideas!