Once upon a time ... there was a woman who bought a store. When she first bought the store, she did all sorts of displays. She once spent half a day collecting fall leaves, then ironing them to preserve them, before using them to decorate the store. She would paint the windows and door (and spend even more time washing them when it was time to change.) She was creative, and spent quite a while every couple months re-designing. Time passed, and she got busier, and tireder, and a little less creative, seeing as she'd already used all of her best ideas. ;)
I think we all do the same thing to an extent, be it at home, at work, wherever, sometimes we just get tired. And, while I like to think all my displays still look good, it's a little harder to get myself motivated to do them after 19 years. Oops, I guess I should add: spoiler alert, the woman mentioned above? That's me!
So, though I may be busier and tireder after 19 years, I still like to make the window display special when I can force myself to get creative. lol About a month ago I did a huge order of our fantastic Charles Viancin corks. These little guys are bright and adorable and best of all, they work like a CHARM! I started thinking about featuring them in the main window and how I wanted to do that.
Getting my recycling ready to take to the recycling center - a major chore that I do a few times a year - I noticed all the different sizes and shapes of glass bottles. Hmm ... Taking them out of the recycling definitely cut down on that trip. I have friends who own a dinner theater and scored a few more interesting looking bottles there.
My collection grew until my entry way (temporary storage) was looking like a frat house had moved in - and decided to give up beer. But what to do with the bottles? I kind of liked the different colors and textures, but the labels were in the way. I thought about removing the labels but UGH, that did NOT sound like fun at all.
Suddenly, a flash of inspiration! What do I do with anything, be it furniture, picture frames, pots, jewelry holders or other assorted trinkets that need to look better? Spray paint it!
I grabbed an extra bottle of spray paint and one of the smaller bottles, ran a quick test, and knew I was in business. A trip to Wal-Mart for a few shades of blue (who doesn't love blue glass bottles?) and I was set.
Of course as soon as I finished the first coat it started raining on me. Shockingly I'm not quite sweet enough to melt, and it actually looked really pretty on the bottles.
It looked nice enough that I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to replicate the look, and had a few ideas, but that was not really the point of this project, so once they dried and I touched up where needed, I packed them up and brought them to the store.
While I was in town getting spray paint (a town big enough is about 40 minutes away, so it's always a major shopping excursion) I wandered into Hobby Lobby and fell in lust with these great Sunflowers. They were even on sale, so come to mama!
(Apparently Sunflowers are natural attractors of Van Gogh, who knew?)
For almost a week I've had a tub of bubble wrapped blue bottles and a pile of sunflowers just waiting for my shipment of corks to arrive and very graciously didn't grab the boxes from the very nice FedEx lady when they did!
Today I cleared out the front window sill:
Then started adding the blue bottles, the yellow sunflowers, the daisy bottle stoppers, and anything else that I thought looked nice.
Tah DAH! Not bad for a tired old shopkeeper, huh? :)
I think I'll take a nap now.