Library Display: September 2014

This month (yes, all month) we are celebrating Banned Books Week!  The ALA promotional material features a "Have You Seen Us" missing poster.  (That's the one in the middle of the window.)  So we riffed on that and made more missing flyers, and created tear-offs at the bottom with the call numbers on them.

But what to do with the display shelves?  The missing flyer theme would be sort of boring, so we brainstormed until we remembered the milk cartons which feature missing children.  Score!  We tried to figure out a way to use real books, but eventually decided to go with a true milk carton look.

First we took cardboard strips and taped them to the front of the shelves to make more support for the paper.  Then we took bulletin board paper (brown on one side, white on the other) and folded it to for and taped it up.  We used red paper for the sides.  The top was created with white poster board, and the blue straw actually goes all the way to the shelf, where it is taped down.  We went through a few iterations of this, but the straw finally "broke the camel's back"...  ::heh:: and gave us the support we needed.  The white lettering is all just printed and cut out, and the red checkerboard and lettering are printed using Publisher and taped on.  Same is true with the book images.

We are pretty proud of this one, and it's been getting attention.  Win!

Library display: May 2014

It's graduation time!

We love flowers, though, and decided it was imperative to continue having flowers on the display.  And since we have a lovely tie-in sign from last year (reduce, recycle, reuse!) it was a win-win.

Spring into Graduation!

This was another easy one to do, except for the little "graduation caps".  And really, those weren't all  that difficult, either.

Black poster board cut into 8"x8" squares.  A triangle for the back with the tip cut at an angle to make a "stand".  I followed these instructions at Sew4Home to make the tiny tassels out of basic embroidery thread (that I had in my crafty box at home).  Then I poked a hole through the center and fed the thread through and taped it on the back side.  Cut a little circle of poster board to make the button.  Used a white paint pen to write on them.  Making the tassel required a few trials, but they took me about five minutes each after I got going.

For the front window we just made a new sign and printed ebook covers.

And finally (my favorite, of course) the welcome dry-erase board:

Fun!!

Library Display: April 2014

Our campus has a huge Earth Day event every year.  It's basically a street fair with a farmer's market, recycling, free food, live music... party!

This year we decided to do our April display to go along with that theme:

You can see what we did there, right?  That shamrock from last month suddenly became a tree!  I brought in some flower pots from home and made "book flowers" with info on them.  And of course we had to have a copy of The Lorax!  Compared to others, this was a really easy one to do.  (Which is a good thing, since April is such a busy month!)  Books on the earth and recycling and gardening and conservation added color and interest to the shelves.

I got a bit whimsical with the dry erase board, but hey - that never costs anything so I can be as creative (or as boring!) as I'd like to be, right?

Finally, we dressed up the front window with a few flower cutouts and some leaves we made for a past display.  (Yes, we keep everything... who knows when you might need it and don't have time to make it again?)

Library Display: March 2014

We went all St. Patrick's Day this year, and picked up some cheap decorations at the party store (because you can never have enough glittery shamrocks, am-I-right?

We also bought rolls of crepe streamers to make the rainbow.  It was a little tricky making them line up, but it added a cool effect down to the pot of gold (black poster board and a printout of a pile of gold coins taped to the top!)  We made the big shamrock with bulletin board paper.

The books were all about the Irish - histories, authors, anything we could remotely tie in.

Then we did the front window with eBooks:

(and more glittery shamrocks!)

Finally, the most difficult part of the whole thing was the dry erase board.  

Nope, the lettering is not a stencil.  It's all done freehand.  I actually cleaned up the knot a bit after I took the pic because some of the lines didn't meet up right.  (Me, OCD?  Not on your life, she said, straightening the pencils in the cup holder.)

Library Display, February 2014

Oh, February, you busy, busy month.  How can you pick one theme for February?  There is just TOO much going on! Black History Month, Valentine's Day, the Olympics, Presidents' Day... just to name a few.

Well...

we gave up and decided to do them ALL!

Nothing fancy here, though we did give the color printer  a workout.  We decided to do a small banner for each event, and coordinate the main "logo" with our top banner.  We removed a shelf to make room, and... voila!

 

Our front window had the same tag line, and as always we pulled eBook covers from Overdrive and our Ebrary / Ebsco databases.

 

Yeah, even our sign was boring this month.  March will be better, I promise!!! 

Library Display, January 2014

So I live in Georgia.  Despite all the polar vortex visits this January, we actually don't get much snow.  So we decided on a snowflake theme for January...  ::brrrrr::

We're hoping folks will get the idea that we have a bunch of different genres, not just the dry dusty stuff for class.  (That's what the little shelf talkers are - the genre.)


And because it's cold and showy, we kept our Christmas fireplace and added a snowy window (recycling some of the black poster board from our haunted house...)

Our window keeps the theme

And of course I love to play with the dry erase markers!

Nuts and bolts:

Not nearly as interesting as the October display, but at least we got to make a bunch of paper snowflakes using paper we already had.  Win!!

September Library Display, 2013

Banned books week!

I give my library associate FULL credit for this one.  She did the signage, and she came up with the design.

"Celebrate the Freedom to Read"

 What's more iconic to Banned Books Week than burning books?

And my favorite Ray Bradbury quote....

Nuts and Bolts:

I brought in a few branches from my back yard, and we crumpled up some packing paper.  Easy peasy.  We cut the flames out of colored paper (not so easy peasy .... actually very annoying!)  But the smart thing we did was be very sparing in our use of tape so we could make sure we can reuse stuff like that.

We displayed books from the banned and challenged lists, and really got students talking about it.  Yay!