project 13: holiday tie-ons

time: various
We all brainstormed ideas for holiday product tie ones. One item from a certain display would generally have some sort of holiday tie on tied around every single product. In the project about candle signage you can see some of the tie ons. This project was very repetitive. It was fun trying to figure out something that was both cheap and fast to put together.

project 12: plant vase

time: 15 minutes
Hannah gave me some sand, some bark, and some rocks that she found interesting and told me to do whatever I wanted with them. After doing it, I learned a lot of what I would do next time, because I never thought about of the effect water might have on it.

project 11: bicycle seat

time: 30 minutes
This little project was fun. Hannah asked me to upholster the bicycle seat. I got to figure out exactly how to fold the fabric, cut the fabric, attach the fabric with whatever I wanted to use to upholster it down. Having never upholstered a bicycle seat, it was very exciting. I chose safety pins.

project 10: welcome home II

Hannah and I really didn't like this project at all, which really made it more frustrating to work on when it was hard. But we totally powered through it. The window was supposed to look like a road map, and we were supposed to use electrical tape, masking tape, and paint as streets and railroads. I did like getting to write the names of streets on the windows. I really like to write backwards. When they first asked me if I could write backwards when I did the hours on the window, I got really excited and told them that I always practice writing backwards and drawing with my left hand. I never had a use for it until then, so that was pretty awesome. What didn't occur to me until after we had to remove this was how difficult masking tape was to remove. I then remembered how the masking tape turned into a very hardened glue-like substance after being exposed to the summer heat and sun on the Hastings window. I was never able to remove it off of the plastic frame where I left small portions of tape. The entire window was covered in an almost gorilla glue like substance that couldn't be scraped off. It was so terrible. Hannah tried to just scrape it, then she tried window cleaner, and finally she had to use Goo Gone. It stunk so bad. We used the entire bottle of Goo Gone on the window so scrape off windows. These windows are huge. They are roughly 4-6 times the area of the Hastings store front windows. It's hard to describe the heat of the sun through big windows without actually feeling it. It was so hot and the smell was so bad that Hannah and I each had to stop every few minutes so that we didn't pass out and fall off the ladder. Then we windexed the windows and scrubbed them, only to find that there was still a film. We had to use the last of the Goo Gone bottle to clean off the window, followed by another windexing. I had experienced paper macheing and painting the store front of Hastings without gloves for about 30 hours in mid-December Missouri weather and how intense that was. I named the streets after each of the 5 streets I have lived on in the last couple of years. Famous streets of Warrensburg, Missouri. I named one street after my cat, Tina. I had a Pine, a Borland, a Troost and a Prospect. I named one after the places where my grandmother lived. I asked a worker there what the name of the street he grew up on was called. That part was fun. I also to happened to have been raised from birth-9 in Roseville, CA where Anthropologie was located. Anthropologie is a very high class store, and I found it ironic that it was located so close to the seemingly "poor," broken down trailer park that I had grown up in. have never been so overwhelmed from working on anything after that morning. It was terrible.

non project: hannah gets her dream house

My cousin and I found a thrown out doll house at the Auburn Placer Disposal Station where he works. People throw away that coolest stuff. Someone was throwing out a wood doll house, complete with working interior and Christmas lights. It had furniture, carpet, wallpaper, people. I told Hannah and she said has been wanting a doll house ever since she was a little kid and never got one. I thought it was really cool but didn't know what to do with it so I gave it to her and this is how excited she was!

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.

project 8: listed store hours

time: 2 hours
This project required me to scrape the existing hours off of the storefront window and replace the old hours with new hours. I used some old dictionaries as reference for the font that I hand drew. This is where my experience painting illustrations on the Hastings storefront came in handy. I drew the new text onto a piece of tracing paper so that I could see through the other side, instead of trying to draw the text backwards. I taped this text to the outside of the window, which happened to be much thicker than any other windows I have worked with. I closed one eye so that my vision would read more like a camera and moved my head along with each letter so that I didn't skew the text. I only drew the "skeleton" of the letter since I was just using my original text illustration as spacing references. I then used the oil-based sharpie to shape the letters. This was probably one of my very favorite projects because I felt honored to change something so permanent and I love drawing text. It was also very challenging to translate what I wanted into a reality because of the thick marker, but that made it more fun. For some reason, this is the only picture I can find at the moment.