Working It: Volunteer work

So I didn't blog last week and I know today isn't Wednesday but I have seriously been working it and I've just now gotten time to blog about it. I was asked to decorate the sanctuary for New Hope Christian Church's upcoming VBS and their theme this year is Deep Sea Discovery. Now, growing up, the churches I attended never did much by way of VBS decorations. There were maybe some posters or signs but no real decorations that I can remember. New Hope goes all out. Like, really, really big, elaborate decorations. But hey, I've got some time and a touch of artistic talent so I figured I was up for the challenge. After some serious Pinterest researching, I sketched out my ideas and mentally planned out how long it would take me to make everything. Seemed simple enough. I figured it would take 4 or 5 days tops. I figured wrong. It took more like 8 or 9 days. Most of which were pretty labor intensive days. Things I thought would take a couple hours ended up taking a couple days instead. Thankfully, I'd allowed 2 weeks even though I anticipated finishing in just 1 week. But as of tonight, it is finally finished and it all turned out beautifully (in my professional opinion) and I'm sure the kids will love it next week during VBS. I fully intended to take tons of pictures along the way but now that I'm blogging I see that I missed LOTS of photos of steps in the creative process. I did get some pics though so I can at least share those.

The original sketches. 

Step 1 in creating the rocks of the coral reef: tear up old magazines.

Step 2: Tape balls of magazine pages to 3 sides and the top of  a sturdy box.

The completed product of Step 2 in making rocks. I had to do this 5 times. This was the smallest of the 5 rocks.

Step 3 of Rock Making was one of many things that I forgot to take pictures of. It was to create a 50/50 mixture of glue and water and paper mache over the taped up boxes. It is recommended that you do 2-4 layers of paper mache. For the sake of time, I only did 2 layers. Let it dry for 24 hours.

Step 4 of rock making: Coat each box in Dryloc to give both durability and texture.

Step 5 was also left out of the photos. It was to spray paint each box with a light sand colored satin paint. 

Step 6: Bring out the details of the rocks by sponge brushing a darker tan color over the spray painted boxes. 

This is what the rocks looked like when I was finished.

For seaweed plants, I cut old cardboard into plant shapes and then painted them in three different colors of green so that they would look more realistic than a simple one-tone green color.

I created coral for the rocks using a can of spray-on expanding foam. It was the thing I thought would be the hardest but ended up being the easiest, least time consuming thing I made. I laid out sheets of wax paper, taped bamboo skewers to them, and simply sprayed the foam over the skewers in random, coral like patterns. Then I let them dry for a day before spray painting them neon pink. I have zero pictures of this process which stinks because it would have made a great pinterest tutorial. 

To make sea stuff to attach to the rocks I took small styrofoam balls, covered them with bamboo skewers and spray painted them in bright blue. Not 100% certain what sea life/sea creature they're supposed to be but they added color and texture and someone else had done it on Pinterest so I did it too. Easy enough to make but I did end up with several teensy tiny little splinters that were a pain to pull out. And of course I didn't take any pictures, go figure.

I also took natural sponges and spray painted them neon yellow. They ended up absorbing a lot of the color and turned out more mustard than neon but that's ok. Again, no pictures were taken.

And lastly, to decorate the rocks, I took Dollar Tree pool noodles and sliced them up. I used lime green ones but really any color would've looked great. These were super easy to cut but gave me a real pain when it came time to super glue them to the rocks. Lets just say it took multiple tubes of super glue and several command strips to get them to stay. I ended up feeling very thankful that I'd only planned to incorporate a small amount of them onto the rocks. 

The church had provided me with a poster of a submarine and a sea turtle. I took those and using a repositionable glue, attached them to foam core and cut them out. I had no clue how hard it is to cut foam core. This ended up being my least favorite task but still turned out great.

I used simple green crepe paper to make seaweed around the submarine and school of fish.

 To make a school of fish, I took old bubble wrap and cut random, free-handed sizes of a basic fish shape. I laid them out, ever so slightly overlapping them and tacked them together with dots of super glue. Then I used my fingers to wipe various bright colors over the bubble side of the plastic. This was easy and I sorta liked how the bubbles in the wrap, once painted, looked like fish scales.

The end result of the centerstage for New Hope Christian Church's 2016 VBS!!!