Getting Caught Up

I have really been looking forward to my first Halloween as Creative Director at my library – mainly because I’d have the Children’s Library as a canvas for cleverness. Long-story-short, due to quite a few unexpected circumstances, I had to scrap some of my more ambitious ideas and get it done as quickly as possible. And let me say, I could not have made it work without my super-creative team – they are amazeballs.

Basically, we focused on the cute and popular book display that says “Get Caught Up in a Good Book” where books are caught in a spider’s web (this is the first one that I saw that was my inspiration).

We took it several steps farther. We made it huge (and ran out of black masking tape which we plan to get more of to finish off the front windows), shrank photocopies of spooky books down (front and back) and added wings to them.

The wings (with little added veins) look amazing in person, but are tough to capture on film. Mary used plastic gift bags and a sharpie to make them.

The photo to the left was the only one where you could sort of see the wings.

With the spiders, I had a very specific look I wanted, which was for them to look like yarn balls, and also like Studio Ghibli’s dust sprites. I had a small crafting meltdown when I started to assemble their parts since they weren’t really coming out like I had imagined. However, I didn’t have time to tweak them at all and just made it work. I think that they look kind of like the dust sprites, so I’m calling it a victory.

Each spider had such personality – and it was a blast to pick out the books that they’d be holding.

An unexpected bonus was that our newest hire, Brittany, was working on the black poster board for the spiders’ frames when she realized she’d have some leftover scraps. So she proposed making a display featuring books about cats and I wholeheartedly agreed to let her go for it.

It went up on what I’m now calling our “Great Wall of Puns” and the pumpkin font says “Check out one of these pawsitively purrfect books!” She used pens and crayon to spruce up the font.

She then cut out 13 cat paws, a kitty cat, and 13 tails to stick into our books on cats. It is beyond cute and her first completely solo display. My only critique (which she totally agrees with) was that the font should have been much, much bigger.

And yes, I’m already making plans for next year’s Halloween displays. I probably have some sort of “display disorder” or something.

UPDATE: FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY – DO NOT USE MASKING TAPE IN YOUR WINDOWS!!! I thought that it might need some extra clean-up, but not to the extent that it turned out to be. It took lots of WD-40 and razor blades to scrape off the gunk left behind. I may try painter’s tape in the future, but never ever masking tape again. Lesson learned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It was a while after this that I realized I could do better by not centering our themes around holidays. And I gotta say that our themes have been much better since we ditched the holiday “obligation.”