FRESH BATCH

Marmalade’s summer display focused on being barefoot in the grass, stopping to smell the roses, and tiptoeing through the tulips.  This quote from the novel The Secret Garden was the inspiration.

Welcome to our Garden Party….

Our window display featured ivy, ferns, mosses and other living plants, including California air plants that we tucked into terra cotta pots and suspended upside down from the ceiling. 

Tissue paper, fishing wire, tiny bits of sponge and drinking straws were used to create this Magnolia garland that we strung throughout the store. 

Grass mats and living moss are the backdrop for the varieties of flowers that we made from tissue paper and little bits of sponge….

…and stick pins with tiny pearls on the end that keep them in place. 

Each week as we made more, the display grew and grew…

…and new species kept popping up!

Our amazingly talented, creative visionary Kerry P. (a former Anthropologie visual merchandiser) created this magical display- to see more photos of the store and the display, check out our Facebook page.

The European travel-inspired window that we did for summer was one of my all time favorites; I put so much love into it, it was hard to take down.  We also got quite a bit of press and recognition over it and so I knew something really great would have to go up in it’s place.   I recently discovered this wonderland in San Francisco called SCRAP (Scrounger’s Center for Reusable Art Parts) and from the moment I pulled up and saw their sign, made of recycled and spray painted bicycle parts, I was instantly inspired! The giant wine barrel full of corks with a sign that read “$1 per bag” is what got me- the “bag” being a grocery bag.  I filled six of them, picked up a used and somewhat dried out rainbow ink stamper for 50 cents and headed home to get to work.   (In hindsight, I should have spent the $10 and bought a new one, as it was a lot of work to get the color saturated enough on each cork to make an impact).  The idea was to have a collage of corks behind the mannequins in the window, but I couldn’t find anything that was recycled and cost effective enough to attach them to..until my brilliant hubby suggested plastic laminate furniture and rug stores use in transportation, so after a dozen phone calls we found a store that was willing to donate theirs to this project. The best way to secure the 647 corks seemed to be with fabric pins, as we found out after a hot glue gun burned holes in the plastic.  We measured, cut and hung the plastic in the window and then positioned the mannequins so we could create the design around them, which would ideally look something like what’s laid out on my dining room table in the photo below.  Unfortunately as I learned several hours into the taxing exercise of standing on a ladder behind the giant sheet of plastic, pushing the pin through it, then crawling beneath it to the other side  to get up on another ladder and pushing the cork into the pin, it was an impossible task for just one person- I needed a team.   KerryLynn tried her best to help but the store was so busy yesterday that she really needed to focus on the customers…so eventually I gave up, defeated.  But all hope was not lost- I remembered that we had an old window that we’d used in previous displays…it wouldn’t have the same effect as I had hoped but at least all my hard work wouldn’t go to waste. 

So after picking all the corks off the plastic and hot gluing them onto the window, this is the result.  Lesson learned: the next time I plan an art project with 647 little parts, I’ll be sure to sketch out a blueprint first and have enough woman power to make the vision in my head a reality!  

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I get inspired easily. At a friend’s baby shower someone had dipped diaper pins in glue and pink glitter and strung them across the wall for decoration. It was so cute and I thought, “what do I have a thousand of that I could make this work with? Clothes pins!”. So with my impending trip to Paris on my brain (my amazing hubs is taking me for my birthday!), I swapped out the glitter for a rubber stamp of French poetry, and voila! Hope you like!