More Summer Fun
On Saturday, Mary and I went nuts getting lots of our Summer Reading Program displays up since it’s a new month and this Friday is the kick-off for summer programming. Before we opened, I laid out the large picture find on the floor once more to re-attach any fallen images, as well as add all the footprints and smaller books.
Biggest lesson learned? Don’t mess with reusable double-sided tape. Whatta mess! As I quickly reattached/added images (with permanent tape), Mary was putting up her fun contribution to the Picture Find: grass made out of book pages. Our plan was to have grass roots coming down from the upper-level grass (which was naturally divided by the window frames). However, upon a few tests, we decided the roots looked too messy and opted not to paint them.
The best surprise was once we hung the giant poster, we noticed that from the back side the picture cut outs looked like stones in dirt. I’d planned on doing one more layer of book pages to back the poster/hide the tape. But once we saw how amazing it looked with the light coming through, we decided to leave it as-is.
I can also reveal how we re-used the clouds from our April Showers display: we turned them into tree tops! Mary painted the clouds green. Then we took poster tubes, covered them with book pages, and did a brown color wash to give it more of a bark-like look. Then we cut a hole in the bottom of the clouds and inserted the tubes. The tubes are stabilized a bit by having 5 lb. weights in their base. We initially set them out on the bookcases with the thought we’d keep our eyes on kids to see if they proved to be too tempting to touch. We had our answer within ten minutes with the first kids in the library (two 7 year-old boys with their grandma).
I can also reveal how we re-used the clouds from our April Showers display: we turned them into tree tops! Mary painted the clouds green. Then we took poster tubes, covered them with book pages, and did a brown color wash to give it more of a bark-like look. Then we cut a hole in the bottom of the clouds and inserted the tubes. The tubes are stabilized a bit by having 5 lb. weights in their base.
We initially set them out on the bookcases with the thought we’d keep our eyes on kids to see if they proved to be too tempting to touch. We had our answer within ten minutes with the first kids in the library (two 7 year-old boys with their grandma).
The boys practically made a beeline for them and almost knocked one onto the ground. We then moved them to a less prominent, but more safe location in some deep windowsills.
I was having to run between our two library locations that day, and left Mary was in charge of continuing our work to get things looking good. She had made many larger-sized versions of the official Summer Reading critters that we put in the windows along with some posters. You can see a few of the critters beneath the trees in the above pictures.
When I came back after being gone about an hour, she had used dry erase crayons and some window cling images that we were not keen on using (since they were so very small-scale compared to everything else we were doing) and created an amazing work of art on our dry erase board. Hooray for having a talented artist on our team!
It was a rather slow Saturday, with only a handful of children coming into the library – and none seemed interested in our giant picture find. However, on Monday morning my boss texted me a picture from about an hour after the library opened (I had the day off – woot!).
What the image showed made my heart soar: a whole group of kids trying to find all of the hidden images!
There is one more large project going on for Summer Reading in terms of décor. It’s VERY close to being finished, but we need a few more supplies. Hopefully I’ll have the finished project ready to show off next week!
