project 9: welcome home

time: many weeks
This was quite possibly the most evil of all the projects that we worked on. I have had a lot of experience mounting large sheets of paper to sticky backed boards during my three year experience working at a frame shop, and very rarely did the mounting go smoothly (figuratively or realistically). Our job was to take three parts of a massive poster, which was printed on a sort of vinyl paper that smelled like burning plastic, glue them down to three equally huge piece of Masonite, and have the edges line up. The idea of the finished product would be that the picture on the board (which I do not have a picture of the front of for some reason) would look like a creased and dog eared map. Once the piece was assembled, Hannah took a jigsaw and attempted to cut out, in a script text which had been traced onto the back of the Masonite, the word "Home." I have generally had a terrible time getting accuracy with a jigsaw as opposed to that of a band saw or a scroll saw, and it turned out to be a nightmare. The curves were not smooth, there were cuts that went to far, and all of the edges were rough. I spent two day straight trying to hand sand the edges and shape them, but finally, after much convincing, the store purchased a dremel tool with sanding bits. This helped some, but it was many more days of sanding and inhaling Masonite dust. The finished product was very modern and very cold, which really conflicted with the aesthetic of Anthropologie. We were doing exactly what corporate wanted. After we decided that the "Home" script looked better than how it started, Hannah cut of of wood the phrase "make yourself at" so that the finished image would say "Make Yourself at Home." The band saw that was purchased for the store use was a very cheap plastic saw from home depot and the tension on the blade was never stable. This caused the blade to constantly break. We went through about six blades in the process of these three words. I have only ever, in over 10 years of shop classes and owning a band saw, seen a blade snap one time. Hannah then tried to cut out the letters with a jig saw, but the up and down motion of the blade was too rough for the thin letters. Hannah, a spirit that will never give up, then tried to saw and shape the letters with a hacksaw and the dremel. One part I forgot to mention was that after we put together the three huge pieces of masonite that we had to build a frame to hold the pieces together. We did a large majority of cutting, gluing, staining and painting outside. We assembled the entire piece only to realize it was too large to fit through the door.
The day came when we were finally ready to hang the large piece in the main storefront window. This went smoothly, but we were still not happy with the look. At some point corporate sent out an email saying the overall look needed to be warmed up at all the Anthropologie stores and we lined the word "Home" with very thick orange yarn. One end of the orange yarn had a giant needle hanging from it. Instead of light shining through "Home", we were instructed to back the hole with a piece of board that had been wrapped in yarn. This was torn down on a day that I was gone. It happened to be a week before we expected so I have been waiting for a photo from Hannah and will post it here for my records.