www.creativeladiesministry.com

[recipe_addict]

I am part of a three person team who leads the women's ministry at my church. We are in charge of the mother daughter banquet in May and we are clueless as to what to do. I found some really cute skits on the creative ladies ministry page that I am going to suggest, but I thought I might post here to see if anyone has any other ideas. We plan on having special music and speakers, as well as door prizes. The skit would be something fresh and new to do. Any other fun ideas?
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Michelle
http://www.youravon.com/mmarshall/
passcode: michelle
http://www.michellemarshall.net

[melissa]

I am not sure how big your church is but we had about 350-375 ladies at our banquet. I guess first would be determine where it would be held. That will help you with decor. etc ideas and how much you will need. We had it in our school gym so we had a lot of area to cover.

Theme: Growing In God's Fragrant Beauty (actually think I got this off this website)
Verse: Eph. 5:2

Decorationg: Garden theme

We had people from our church volunteer to let us borrow items pertaining to gardening such as:

artificial (and some real trees we were allowed to borrow from an area nursery) trees, potted flowers, plants, watering cans, garden benches, birdbathes, birdhouses (decorated ones), garden flags (we used these outside where we set a prop up to have each lady with her daughter(s) picture taken as a memory of the banquet, we just went simple on the tables with greenery arrangements (low ones to the table) with a floating candle in center of each arrangement. We also placed small watering tins (you can get these in the craft dept. at Wal-mart) and placed mints in them. We used a lighted arch and decorated it with lots of greenery and flowers. We purchased butterflies (made out of netting type material---at the Family Dollar or Dollar Tree stores), we hung them from the ceiling at our entrance. We also used lots of lattice with clear lights on them to give it a more formal gardening look. It was beautiful.

Our menu: we had a family in our church who does catering to do ours and charged each lady $6 per ticket. We had tossed salad, 3 dressings, ham/apples, green beans, corn, mashed potatoes, dessert, pudding for kids 10 and under, bread and tea.

We had men from our church volunteer to serve the ladies...they kept our glasses filled with tea, took our dirty plates, served us dessert. The ladies went through a line to get the main course meal though.

For doorprizes, we went around to area businesses and restaurants and told them we were having a Mother/Daughter Banquet and we asking area businesses to donate doorprizes. You'll get a lot of nice things that way. Be sure you put in a little 'plug' for the business who donates.

We got purple paper placemats for each setting. Oh, we also added just a little silver confetti down the middle of the tables to add a little sparkle since we had the lights low.

We handed out bulletins with numbers on the back. That is how we did our doorprizes. We usually got around 25 or so doorprizes I believe. Then seperate, all girls 10 and under, they had a seperate ticket, given at the door (you can get these at Wal-mart as well) and we went to the dollar store and picked up purses, sunglasses, stickers, some ladies donated jewelry for the little girl door prizes, stationary, etc) We had 12-15 doorprizes for the little girls.

We did do a skit but we have two men in our church that do an excellent job and just make up silly stuff.

We had a speaker, special singing. For our background music as the ladies came in and while they were eating, we had a nature tape (birds, water falls etc) playing softly to add to our gardening theme. It turned out to be beautiful.

Hope this helps. It's a lot of work but it's fun. That was my first one I'd ever did. You definately need a group of ladies who are committed to help you and I was blessed with that.

I also had a saying I made like business card size tags to place on the wrapped utensils we had at each setting. I'll try to find it. It went along with the garden theme and said something like...Oh, now I got it

A garden of beautiful memories was planted by you--Mother!