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| Dandelions! (check out the sky background!) |
So, we've had this dream to do a window with huge nature elements for a while -- specifically giant mushrooms. It's finally happened! Yay!
We always try to think of things a little differently for Liberty windows. That's what we call the windows that coincide twice a year with the Liberty Antiques Festival in Liberty, North Carolina. The mall gets tons of traffic during those weekends -- people from all over the southeast make the store an add-on to their Liberty trek -- so we like to make it count! In Blackbird girl-ese, "we're doing the Liberty window" translates to "we're doing a super-crazy-quirky-oddball window."
Add to this the fact that Collector's Antique Mall is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and we knew the first Liberty window of the year had to be giant-sized, off-the-wall crazy.
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| Mushrooms and wooly worm (we call him Philbert) |
This was a
giant build for us. We had to make soooo much time in our schedule to get the parts together, and then find room to store the ginormous pieces and parts. The large mushroom cap started as a big umbrella, layered with papier mache, screen, tape, etc. It's over 6 feet tall, with a span of probably 2 1/2 feet. It was delicate, it was fussy, it was time-consuming -- but it ended up looking fantastic!
The worm is faux fur sewn into a tube, with a newspaper and wire armature inside. We roughly taped off stripes and hit it with orange and yellow spray paint. We used landscaping burlap on the walls to cover the peg board (mainly because it was natural looking, and well, we already had it!). The "grass" was made from laminate flooring underlay we had leftover from our house. It was a foam-y plastic material. We spray painted it all different greens, using up odds and ends of paint we had leftover from different projects. Once dry, it rolled up easily, and I cut freehand blades right before we installed them.
The sky was made from two thrift store white sheets, spray painted with pale blue paint. We just kept the paint very splotchy and misty to mimic clouds. Once installed under the lights, across the window, the sky just came alive! I wish the photos could capture it -- it really looks like a blue sky!
The dandelions were a happy accident! We knew we wanted to do some flowers, but what kind? When we came across a box of 3000 drinking straws at a Goodwill for $3, it all fell into place. The center of the puff is a decorative ball from a craft store, and the straws were hot glued to it. Some of them were left as they were, and some were clipped to make a frilled tip. The dandelion flower is a straw hat with layers of yellow crepe paper streamers, cut into petal shapes. The stems are slim PVC pipes, covered with green crepe paper streamers. For even more whimsy, we hung frilled straws from the sheet sky, to look like floating dandelion fluff!
In our window world, we imagined that someone would want to picnic under a giant mushroom, so we merchandised with springy, picnic themed items. A vintage quilt in yellow and turquoise, combined with turquoise glassware, stacks of picnic baskets, and insect themed finds completed our dream.
What do you think? We're really excited about it! It's in the running to be considered our favorite window... AND we have 2500 straws left. Hmmm...
