I have made yet another display for the library. This one’s for December/January and is a winter-themed one. I actually came up with the idea several months ago, but it had to be put on the back burner for obvious reasons and because of not having much time to work ahead on such projects. At any rate, I have pictures, and while these were taken with the phone rather than a real camera, I’ll eventually take better pictures at some point because I’m thinking about turning these displays into a book (a number of people at the library are excited at the idea). Enjoy the pictures! Explanations of each follow the image.

Here’s the whole display. You can see that it’s essentially supposed to be a person’s living room on a snowy night with a warm fire, dozing cat, a mug of . . . something (could be tea, coffee, or hot chocolate sans marshmallows), some cookies, and well, books, obviously. You can click on the above picture to get a slightly larger one. Mind you, the quality’s not the greatest ’cause it was taken with the phone, but it’s still pretty good.

Here’s a close-up of the back of the sofa and the end table. The idea is that you’re standing behind the couch looking over the shoulder of um, the invisible reader. I guess maybe you’re the reader and you’re on your way back from a bathroom break or something. I uh, I tend to over-analyze these things. Have you noticed? Regardless, the couch is made of a few layers of batting with velvet fabric stapled/taped to the edges. It was probably the easiest part of the whole display aside from painting the floor and wall. The end table is cardboard and construction paper and is probably way fancier than needs be. Then again, I like the fanciness of it. 🙂

Indeed, these are the crocheted cookies I made quite some time ago, and next to them, a crocheted mug with beverage whose pattern I found on-line. A lot of people asked me, “What’re you gonna do with crocheted cookies and mug?” Yeah, well, I found a use, so ha! They’re fastened to the cardboard of the end table with twist ties so kids don’t wander off with them. I have yet to hear any comments on them, but they’ve only been up since the second.

Here we have the fireplace. This was the most complicated and time-consuming to make. The cat is made of felt with fabric paint for its features and pipe cleaner (now called “chenille straws”) for whiskers. The books’ images were printed from the internet then I gave them dimension by making little boxes for them out of construction paper. You’ll be able to see that better in a later view. The fireplace itself is also made of construction paper formed into boxes. I drew all the bricks myself then used an image of marble printed multiple times and glued down for the mantelpiece. The soot? That’s some toner from one of our microfilm machines. I get that stuff all over me every time I fix a paper jam, and I knew it’d be the perfect dirty black for the back wall of the fireplace. The fire is yellow and orange tissue paper, purchased back around Halloween because when else are you going to find orange tissue paper? The sticks are real. I stopped in the middle of an afternoon and asked Elaine if I could go outside and pick up sticks. At first, I thought she was going to ask why, but she just shook her head and told me to go do whatever. I think they’re finally realizing how random I am. 🙂 The director and Sandy saw me outside while I was doing this and were initially confused but then shrugged it off as “It’s Erin; she has her reasons.” 😀 The grate (because we must also promote fire safety!) is made out of pipe cleaner as well. To be honest, the fireplace is my favorite part of the whole thing!

Here’s the window and curtains a little better. Originally, we were simply going to put the cotton balls on the foamcore board itself, but then I had the idea of cutting out the window and putting the construction paper sky on the wall behind it, seen in the last photo below. In the above picture, you can see a little better how the books are 3-D. In the below photo, you can see the depth of the window/sky better. Sandy did the curtains and she did an awesome job!

So there you have it: another awesome display at the Jasper Public Library. I really like the idea of turning all of this into an instructional craft book for other libraries, but that means I’m going to probably have to remake entire sections of some of the posters in order to show step-by-step processes. I’ll also have to redraw entire sections for use as templates, and well, then there’s the whole matter of editing all the images (once I take them with a camera) and writing up the whole mess. I’d also like to have more displays under my belt before considering a whole book. After all, so far we’ve had summer, banned books, Halloween, NaNoWriMo, and now winter. There’s also technically the displays we’ve put up in the genealogy room windows as well as a poster I made for the crochet class. Hell, even the murals could be used as inspiration for permanent displays. It’s a future project. Right now, I kind of need to finish writing/editing three novels. 😉 I think I might actually go work on one of them right now. Pictures to expect soon: crocheted snowpeople. 😀