[ASTalumna06]

For big/little night, the littles buy a piece of fabric of their liking, usually at Wal-Mart, a yard or two in length. That night, the bigs and littles make t-shirts together. The letters on the t-shirt are made from the fabric the littles picked out. Also, they cover their new member binders with the fabric. After that, their bigs take what’s left of the fabric with them. We have a tradition in my chapter that while the littles make paddles for their bigs, the bigs make pillows for their littles, and they use the leftover fabric for that. The pillow is similar to a paddle in that it is to include our letters, the big’s and little’s names (nicknames are optional), our chapter, the big’s and little’s new member class designations, and the semester. But girls get really creative with the pillows. For one family tree, all of their pillows are shapes. One girl had three littles, and she made one little an anchor, another one a yellow rose, and another one was a teddy bear (our mascot). One of them then made their little, who is nicknamed Pink Panther, a pillow in the shape of a panther. It was awesome. And her fabric was a leopard-type print, so it looked really good.

Another big thing for us, on top of making lettered shirts, is to decorate canvas tote bags. We do the same iron-on fabric thing that we do with the shirts. Most of the girls will use them to carry their officer binders to the meetings.

Picture frames are always popular.

Wooden jewelry boxes. You can buy them at A.C. Moore or Michaels and decorate them however you want. And go to these stores anyway for craft stuff. There are usually a lot of things that say “sisters” on them.

And my great grandlittle is currently making her little a framed collage of pictures of our family tree to give to her at initiation.

There are a TON of things you could do.