Girl Scout Cookies and Weight Watchers, a tough combination!

I don't know if it's good timing or not... but I'm the cookie mom for Lexi's Girl Scout troop, and I'm back on Weight Watchers.

OUCH!

Here is what my house looked like Monday afternoon.

That's 117 cases of cookies.

That 1404 boxes of deliciousness.

And let's see... Girl Scout cookies vary from about a point a piece for the most basic cookie to two points a piece for the ones I really want on WW.

So lets see.  33 cases of Samoas at 2 points a piece for each cookie

times 12 boxes per case times 14 cookies makes...

11,088 points.

I get 26 points a day.

So I could eat Samoa cookies for my full allotment of points every day for the next 426+ days. 

And then I could start on the Tagalongs.

Wow.

Thanks goodness we have 11 very excited girls that are selling cookies.

Or I might be in trouble.

I am happy to report however, that even with the cookies living in my house for the last week, I still lost 2 pounds!

Whew. And I totally blew it on Saturday.

Starting the day with 3 Tagalongs for breakfast will do that to you.

February 21st can't get here soon enough!

Girl Scout Mural

Lexi's Girl Scout troop has been working on their painting badge. This meant, I was involved. One of the options for the culminating project was to paint a mural.

So.. why not?

Here is what they did.  Isn't it so cute :)

 Really, it wasn't hard to do this. But is seems daunting to a lot of people, so here is a tutorial.

1. Take a picture of the group.

2. Using photoshop or another photo-editing software take out the background, and compress the photo into one layer.Then add the layers that you want to include. Notice that I have a number of typos in it.. I did fix the file prior to using it, but I guess I didn't save the corrected one.

3. Make a transparency. This might have been the hardest step as NOBODY makes transparencies anymore and I don't have the right kind of printer to do it at home.

4. Now, find one of those old fashioned overhead projectors and get a large piece of paper. I used a special heavy duty art paper called RendR from Crescent. It's a no show heavy paper on a roll. It's expensive, but worth it for a long-term project.

5. Trace the image.  Have your child proof your work. Thankfully Lexi noticed that the I had the troop number wrong! (That's why you use pencil!!)

6. Take it to the kids and have them paint themselves. Use solid colors. Can you imagine how chaotic the mural would be if I had let them try to give themselves faces and details. I had the girls use a special solid poster paint that doesn't make a mess!! It's called Playcolor. It's paint that dries in about 10 seconds... unless you use it really, really heavy.. then it takes 30 seconds.  I love how each girl is represented in a different color and that the colors blended when overlapped. We talked about how this was like making new friends :) !

I was sorry that two of the girls weren't there for the painting portion, but that's the way it works when you are dealing with kids. I decided that it was better to just get the mural finished without them.

After the meeting, I finished up the mural by adding a layer of black paint to the green text and outlining the girls and the logo.

Now all I have to do is go hang it in the hut!!

Self Portrait Girl Scout Style

Today at Girl Scouts the girls were working on their painting badge. I've been helping with this badge. Last time, I had the girls do printmaking, today it was self portraits.

 

Over the years a lot of people have asked me about portraits and are always looking for a simple way to do them. Below is how I had the girls do their portraits today in under an hour.

 

1. A little prep work. Print out a picture of each child on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper. Just a simple black and white picture from the printer will do.

 

 

 2. Flip the paper over and use charcoal/graphite and completely coat the paper. The kids did their own. Yes, it's a little messy, but easy to do.

3. Turn the page back over and using a simple pencil or color and trace the features onto a piece of watercolor paper. We just used 9x12 bulk watercolor paper. I don't worry about the extra charcoal that is left in smudges around the paper as it provides a nice realistic touch later..

4. Using watercolor pencils, I had the girls color in their portraits. You could use traditional pan or tube watercolors, but I like the easy and convenience of watercolor pencils. After they colored their portraits, I gave them water and brushes and put them to work.

 

5. Here is the finished product. The girls really loved them. I think they felt successful and enjoyed the process.

 

Truly, this is such a fun project for kids, that I'd say it would be a great project even for a vbs or a camp setting. And its cheap too :) !