I have been a bad at blogging lately as I was in charge of decorations for our high school auction where my kids are a freshman and a junior. The theme this year was "Captain Cleveland and the Wonder Warriors". (Cleveland is the name of the high school, warriors are our mascot). It was a fun superhero theme and I wanted to share some of the fun I had while staying within a small budget.
This is the logo - so we went with a kind of old superhero theme. The colors were red, green and yellow.
We held the auction at an old amusement park here in Portland called "Oaks Park" It was built in 1905. We used the old dance pavilion for the event as well as renting a huge tent to give us some extra space. It was a wet, cold day and they even predicted snow in the evening perhaps. The pavilion is on the right of the tent.
I created a "Captain Cleveland" from old mannequin parts that I duct taped together. Initially he was going to hang from the ceiling, but he had weight issues with the old ceiling. We ended up having him stand on a podium on stage with a fan behind blowing his cape to give the illusion of flight! His hands are made from dish gloves.
I used some old donated comics and cut out the pages into triangles. We made a banner with them and hung that from the ceiling. We also hung honeycomb balls to give us some color and to give a center-point to the banners.
There is a very focal lattice wall that you see when you first walk into the pavilion. I wanted to do stripes of color so I bought IKEA shower curtains and split them in half. We created a striped wall when we hung them from the lattice.
This was one of my favorite ideas. I needed to make reserved table signs. I asked a local trophy company to donate just the trophy figures. I spray painted them yellow, added red superhero capes and mounted them on tin cans that I covered with pages from a superhero calendar.
We didn't' want to use the traditional votive nor did we want to use flowers (not alot of superheros with flowers). We used mason jars and filled them with the floral stuff that expands into a gel (like jello) when you add water. We colored it green or yellow. We also inserted glow sticks in the goo - great idea, but our room wasn't quite dark enuf for the full effect. We used soft wire to do the spiral at top of the jar and added a superhero comic square. Rounded out the table with a splash of color with IKEA napkins, a black superhero mask, and postcards made from old comic book covers.
I painted about 30 big posters with various superhero action words that we sprinkled thruout the tent and the pavilion. My favorite words were "sploot" and "blak".
View of the inside of the rented tent. We also used alot of balloons for color as well as using them in arrangements in vases.
Auction went well. I am exhausted. I even wore a superhero costume, carried a glue gun and called myself the "Crafty Crusader". For some reason I didn't get a picture of that!
I'll be back in the studio this week...Easter bunnies will be jumping out of the studio soon.
