Tattoos for Teens

When I proposed programs for spring 2014 I decided to push the envelope a little. I thought it would be interesting to have a tattoo program where the teens could design and make their own temporary tattoos. My hope was that we could get a positive conversation going with the teens about tattoos: pros, cons, history, the current and historical connotations, trends, etc. Anything they wanted to talk about, this would be the place! I was more than a little surprised when the proposal was approved, and Tattoo Art was born!

It was also around this time that I realized something. When we hold programs we often close the doors to the room so we're not disruptive or so little ones don't escape, etc. (it depends on the program). So we lose a lot of potential attendance from walk-ins that have no idea there's a program going on (or what all the noise behind the door is). So I decided to make this:

I set this outside the doors so that passers by would see what was happening and (hopefully) stop in. It's much more eye-catching than taping the tiny flier to the doors (which I still do too) and it feeds on the current chalkboard art trend. On the other hand, it's extremely time consuming. I'm getting better, but they don't exactly put themselves together!

A lot of this program wound up being a giant experiment. Some of it worked and some of it didn't. So let's talk.

What worked:

• The first thing we did was find our tattoos. I made a secure Pinterest board of black ink tattoo ideas and opened it up on a couple of our iPad minis. The teens really enjoyed that an even ventured (with caution and supervision) out into the internet to find their own designs.
• To transfer an outline onto the skin we traced our chosen design on tracing paper, then filled in the lines SUPER thick (remember that words or designs that must be applied a particular direction will need to be double traced so they go in correctly). Then dampen the area you want to apply the design, put the tracing paper on pencil-side-down, and wet the back of the paper for several seconds. Basically like applying a real temporary tattoo. Really, this just gives you a vestige of what to trace/fill-in when we go in for the next step.
• We used black liquid eyeliner to trace the penciled image. I tested it at home with pencil eyeliner, and it works well, but it's hard to use  fine tip and it isn't as bold as the liquid. so it all depends on the look you're going for.
• Once it's finished, cover the design with baby powder and gently brush off the excess. This helps to dry and "set" the design. It also makes it look a little faded and more realistic.

What didn't work:

• A lot of the sites I looked into when researching the temporary tattoo process said that sealing the design would keep it permanent for several days. This begs more investigation, but from what I saw... it's a bald-faced lie.
• Options included spraying the design with hairspray or liquid bandage. Since the latter is designed to seal wounds and use on large areas of skin, I went with that. Yeah. Bad idea. As it turns out, this makes the tattoo shrink on the skin and start flaking off after only a few hours. True, the entire design wouldn't come off (without serious scrubbing) for a full day... but it's nowhere near what I was promised.

So that was something of a disappointment. But the teens had a blast! Check out some of their amazing designs:

Also, my colleges who allowed me to use them as practice canvases:

(Probably should have tested it more than five hours before the program, but I didn't. Learn from my mistakes.)

And me:

(The first Totoro was an experiment and I did some things seriously wrong, so it came off within an hour. The other ones are doodles I did during the program while chatting with the teens.)

I don't have any tattoos, mostly because I have no idea what I'd put on myself. But these would be contenders. Baby Totoro, an abstract stack of books, and the Dewey decimal number to the children's section.

Jedi Training Day

Back in April I had my first real "big event." Basically it was a family/all ages program... with no registration. Which means I had to plan for an event with no idea what kind of numbers to prepare for. I have since been given advice for how to manage that kind of scenario, but at the time I had to make it up on the fly! Plus, I had some great people behind me to pull it off.

With May the 4th quickly approaching, I wanted to have a Star Wars themed program; so we came up with Jedi Training Day:

Flier and bookmark for the event.

The program was made up of six stations. When a family or individual signed in the were given a training card (like a checklist). When they completed a station they got it marked off their training card. Once everything was checked off they got a completion certificate and could enter their training card into the prize raffle.

The stations were:

Looks like someone's making their own R5-D4!

Build a Droid

Participants made their own droids using paper cups with droid leg templates attached by brads (this let the legs move more realistically). Details were added with colored paper, glue, and markers. The end results were pretty awesome!

Sometimes the simplest design is the most effective.

Design a Starfighter

This station had lots of instructions and supplies for a variety or origami Star Wars ships, as well as some basic paper airplane instructions. Participants were able to get creative with their designs and decorate their starfighters with crayons and colored pencils.

Flying their starfighters.

Test Flight

We taped out 15 lines one foot apart and had participants throw their starfighters from behind the start line. Then they measured out how far their starfighter went. They had lots of opportunities to tweak (or recreate) their design and try again until they were happy with the results.

Lightsaber construction is serious business.

Build Your Own Lightsaber

These are surprisingly simple to make. Take 1/2 a sheet of poster board (cut length wise) and roll it into a slightly tapered tube. Tuck the wide end into an old paper towel tube and secure the small end with tape. Decorate the handle (the paper towel tube) with aluminum foil, duct tape, and electrical tape (works well for buttons) until your heart's content.

Caution: darksaber in use!

Lightsaber Training Station

A few weighted balloons serve as targets for excited young Jedi's. We even kicked up the intensity by blowing bubbles for them to aim at. (PRO TIP: Have extra balloons on hand. Little Jedi's are very good at destroying targets.)

Being a Jedi takes a lot of training!

Obstacle Course

Our obstacle course consisted of five challenges:

1. Dodging Stormtrooper Fire (climbing through zig-zagging red string)
2. Wading Through the Trash Compactor (making it through knee deep "garbage)
5. Bowling Down the Stormtroopers (knocking down soda bottles with stormtrooper faces)
4. TIE Fighter Target Practice (shooting TIE fighter targets with a Nerf gun)
5. Detsroying the Death Star (throwing beanbags at our Death Star target)

On top of all that we had some wonderful people from the 501st and Rebel Legion come in to take pictures and talk with the kids (and adults). We even had our own Master Obi Wan give a lightsaber safety demonstration... it was amazing! These guys were really fabulous and turned the event from being pretty cool to being awesome!

Lightsaber safety demo in progress.

Note the proximity of the fan.

Also, a heads up for anyone working with these or other costumed performers (we have a few coming up in 2015) those amazing outfits are hot! Make sure you have adequate AC and plenty of fans to keep them cool. We had to drag in five fans just to make the room comfortable for those not in costume; I can't imagine how hot these guys were. They were absolutely wonderful about it and I didn't hear a single complaint... but they sure were happy when the fans made an appearance.

One last thing: check out the awesome dress I made! I may be a little proud of it.

Beep-boo-beep!

See!? I told you!

I told you all I was bad at this blogging thing! I'm trying to get back on track this month. There have been a few awesome programs and interesting shake-ups since I last shared with you all, so bear with me and stay tuned! Good things take time.

Regency Week(end)

In my Time Flies post I mentioned two things that I needed to catch you all up on: Sewing for Advertising and Regency Week(end). Today I am finally able to discuss both!

A little over a month ago I was cornered by the vending machine at work. This is roughly the conversation that ensued:

Awesome person: "Hi, Jessica! I don't think you know me...."

Me: ".... I think I do... maybe. Aren't you [insert Awesome Person's real name here]?" (said while discreetly double checking work badge)

Awesome person: "Yes! Okay, so you're the person who likes to dress up, right?"

Me: "Yes I am!"

And so the conversation progressed. In the end I discovered that there was going to be a big Jane Austen event at our local historical home, the Francis Land House (learn more about the house here). In an effort to strengthen the budding relationship between the libraries and Historical Houses organization we would kick off the event Friday night with a showing of Becoming Jane. Then Saturday would be a regency fair at the Francis Land House. My part in the whole thing would be to drum up interest through advertising. Normally advertising means fliers and talking up programs. This time it meant costumes! My duty was to dress in regency garb for several days prior to the event to get people talking! Also somehow during the ensuing conversation between Awesome Persona and my manager, I wound up not only assisting at the Friday night showing, but also volunteering at the Saturday event. Who knew!?

Flier put out by Historical Houses

And so the sewing began. And after several weeks, lots of angst, and some bruised fingers, I officially hate sewing. Not really... but it will be a while before I look at my sewing machine with less than a feeling of disdain.

And here are the results!

Striking a pose next to our mini Austen display

My grandma sent me some extra fancy bits (the fan and hat, for instance)

At the Friday night movie. You have to dress up for the theater, right?

Casual day wear for the Saturday event

Friday:

The movie Friday night was an after hours event... which means that the library was closed for an hour or two before we opened the doors to the auditorium. Honestly, those events are a hard sell. Its hard to get people excited to come back to the library after they've already left for the day. But we did get about 10 people total, and that is pretty sweet! We had one of the Historical Houses people there to give more information about the Saturday event and to show off some of the fun things that would be available.

The movie itself was alright. A lot of people were insisting that it was an accurate depiction of Jane Austen's romantic life... which bugs me a little. I'd like to think it was less high school high-drama than that. Plus, at the end they elude to her being a famous author while she was alive and--from what I understood--that is false. She was published anonymously until after her death, so she wouldn't have had fans talking to her about how amazing her books were. But I suppose it made for good cinema.

I would have liked to have a discussion after the event. We had a few people ask about that before and a couple people afterwards were questioning me about things in the film. I think it might have been nice to get the conversation going between the film's attendees instead.

Saturday:

The event Saturday was lots of fun. Admission was $2 and included the house tour (which is normally $5 on its own). I helped mostly with the craft table (where we had quilling, paper dolls, and sweet bags). I also spent some time inside doing readings for visitors, which most people seemed uncomfortable with, but it was the entertainment of the day in regency times. I did have a few people who were into it though. One even took the book and read to me! Very fun. I also poked around the games table and played some cup and ball, badminton (or a variation of it), and hoops. There were also stations about the fashions of the day, the language of the fan, and even a glass armonica! All very cool.

The crafts tale and my craft table buddy

The games station and authentic regency Hall's Auto in the background

Inside the house with these fine ladies

Regency clothing. She made her whole outfit. Lovely!

The glass armonica waiting to be played!

I ad to leave early, but there was also a guest speaker that evening on hierarchy and seduction in regency fashions. Pretty cool, if you ask me.

The weirdest thing I found in all of this is that if you wear a costume for a week people will default duties to you. "Well you should talk to them because you're dressed up all fancy." I also found that people were hesitant to actually ask about the. I would get comments about being a Disney princess or going to a wedding, but very few people directly asked about the outfits. So I had to be ready to introduce the topic from a variety of angles.

And that is what I learned about sewing for advertising as well as information on regency week(end). I hope you enjoyed!

Merh!

"Merh," is the sound I make when I'm displeased with something that is officially out of my control; for instance:

I took most of this week off to spend a little time with my hubby. I figured we'd have plenty of down time and I'd be able to relax after the past month of craziness and catch up on some blogging. So in preparation for such an endeavor, I left some of the images I need for blogging at work. *deadpan* Yup. Because I'm awesome like that.

Merh!

 I will, however, persevere and venture to post for you what I can. I already owe you all about 5 belated posts.

Spotlight Displays

It's about time I got back to you all. So today I thought I'd talk about displays! Mostly because all the pictures are already set for this one. Basically... I'm being lazy. Let's get started!

Every library has displays. I've done a few in my time... although many of them I don't have pictures of anymore. (I used to be very bad at documentation.) But here are a few for reference:

This is from another branch I worked at two years ago, roughly

The front and back of my 3D shark display from early last year

Not strictly a display, but taking up display space

Using myself as a display! More on this later

I'm very sad about some of my missing displays. I did an interactive paper crane display about four years ago for the Intentional Day of Peace. We had a replica of the Children's Peace Memorial in Japan and patrons made paper cranes for us to send to the monument (which I still haven't sent; some of the string broke and it's hard to find space to thread 1,000 paper cranes). Perhaps I'll revisit that display again this year. But I digress.

So we have two display spaces at my library location that are hurting. Most displays are on a rotation list and are taken care of by people throughout the year. Not these. Sadly, these are also the two near the teen section of the library, so shouldn't it be even more captivating not less?

Anyhow, our teen services librarian has come up with some passive program ideas and that's helped us fill up some of the space.

Before and after shots of April's passive program display

So that's filling out pretty well. We even had a decent number of people interested in creating some blackout poetry! (Happy--late--National Poetry Month by the way.)

The other display that's been hurting is just around the corner. It's a small, plain, black shelving unit that was supposed to be a graphic novel spotlight; partially because we have the only anime club in the system and partially because we had an overabundance of graphic noels. Unfortunately, we moved to a floating collection and our graphic novels all left! Now it's very difficult to fill up three shelves with related spotlight titles. Additionally, the space started to become a catch-all for fliers, bookmarks, handouts, etc. Which is great... but it was looking cluttered and sad; so Susan and I took charge of the situation.

Now the display is two fold. The first part is a program highlight display where we promote upcoming teen/teen interest programs for the month. We include titles related to the featured program as well as fliers and bookmarks (in addition to whatever other fliers and bookmarks need to be displayed for the month). The second part of the display is the original graphic novel spotlight. The only change to that is that the spotlight now ties into the program highlight as well. Easy peasy!

We've only just started this idea, but I'm happy with the results so far:

CSI program highlight featuring Case Closed

Jedi Training Day (now a May the 4th display)

I'm excited to see where this goes! This month is going to be tricky ... I have a tattoo program. Good thing more and more teen books feature tattoos! I wonder what graphic novels do... hmmm....

Time Flies...

... when you try to take on too much!

I can barely believe it's been nearly a month since my last post to you. I am ashamed to have neglected you all so much. I've had a few big projects on my plate, even a few that have taken over my at-home free time! Even this post, dear readers, has to be  short one because I need to get ready for work soon. However, here are some of the things you can look forward to hearing about soon (i.e. these are the things that have been taking up my life).

Storytimes

Spotlight Displays

Jedi Training Day

Sewing for Advertising

Regency Week(end)

Flier Regulating

New Minecraft Project

And the list goes on. Not to mention, I have more book reviews for you all! That should be enough to get the apology ball rolling... am I right?

Until next time, gentle readers. Don't give up on me just yet!

Minecraft in Review

The other big program we had this month was Minecraft Madness. You may remember me discussing this a few weeks back as a future event... well it finally happened, and now we can visit it in review!

(Disclaimer: we were pretty neglectful in getting pictures. What we have is courtesy of a fellow staff member who came in at the very beginning--when we only had a handful of attendees--and me frantically taking pictures of things during the last 5 minutes. So you'll probably notice so repeat photos from the days leading up to the event. Sorry guys!)

Pretty home-made flier.

As I mentioned before, this program was the brainchild of my coworker and friend, Ashley. (Check out her blog, where she posts book reviews and discusses upcoming releases. Pretty cool stuff!) She's very much behind getting Minecraft in libraries and has even been advocating to get the PC version on our teen computers. The funny thing is... she's never played the game (besides a brief crash-course/training I gave her). Which is why I was pulled in to help out; which I had an absolute blast doing!

Take-home reminder cubes.

We decided to run Minecraft Madness arcade-style. Each station the kids visited was worth a ticket. Some (more complicated stations) earned them two tickets. They got to use their tickets toward a variety of prizes and books, or they could enter their tickets into a raffle for gift cards to Barns & Noble or Game Stop.

There was a station for them to make their own mini minecraft chests. A few of them got creative and made an ender chest... which I kind of wish I had planned for. But alas, I overlooked that particular update! All is well though; the kids made it work.

A well loved (read, "messy") chest-making station.

Ashley inspecting a chest. (Notice our spider decor?)

We also had a design station for them to make their own Steve skins or deign their own minecraft buildings using grid paper. I printed some suggestions for skins and a key of all the minecraft blocks since some of the kids, inevitably, were new to the game. In a way, this served as a learning space as well as a design station.

The next--arguably most popular--station was the perler bead station. I printed out all the different minecraft weapons and tools (ones that were simple enough to build with perlers) to serve as templates, and the kids got to make their own minecraft perler things! We had some venturous kids make their personalized Steve heads and some emeralds and diamonds too, but mostly they stuck with swords and bows. My job was to iron all the little perlers together (as well as mend some finished weapons that got snapped), so I was able to see all of their amazing creations.

Shovel in progress!

Finished tools (and their prize tickets) cooling after being fused.

The original idea was to turn them into key chains, but somewhere during setup I lost the jump rings! So instead, I sent the kids home with a key ring and instructions about how to attach it using things from home. Most of the parents were very understanding about this misstep, but I still feel bad.

Another station we had was a papercraft station. Here we had dozens of sheets of papercraft for the kids to make. If you made a cube papercraft (element blocks, slimes, pumpkins, etc.) you got one ticket. If you ventured to try making a mob or Steve papercraft, you could get two tickets! I saw a lot of cubes. We did find one Steve leg during clean up but we never found the rest of him; poor guy.

Making a tiny papercraft weapon.

There was also an option at the papercraft station to make a 6" paper torch. These were the perfect size for a single glow stick (which we provided) to fit inside of and light up, sort of like a real torch! I think just about everyone made one of those. In retrospect, I hope they didn't close up their torch with the glow stick inside, or that they snapped it before they did. Otherwise they're going to have to destroy their torch in order to make it glow. Oops!

Putting together some torches.

Our last--most amazing--station was the game itself. My husband and I (with some help from an awesome friend and coworker) spent 26+ hours outside of work building a world for the kids that had all the supplies they'd need, as well as a spawn house, and a number of mini games for them to compete in. I discussed before how this whole plan was nearly botched, so I won't address that again here; suffice to say that the first 30 minutes of the program were especially stressful.

Our troubleshooting team in deep contemplation.
Also... I'm dressed as Steve! (Sort of.)

The mini games included:

• A boat race, complete with glowstone lined tunnel
• An archery range (which I overheard the kids say was, "actually kind of hard")
• A version of King of the Ladder with a water pit for softer landings
• A caving race where the kids competed to find the hidden wool in a cave
• A player vs. player battle arena ringed in fire
• And... DEATH HOUSE!

I have to brag a little here, because death house is amazing. My husband built this masterpiece; It's three levels of intense zombie battle. When you enter death house you are immediately sealed in. You grab your gear and head in to level one where dispensers release a hoard of zombies for you to fight. Once they're defeated you enter the next hallway, grab more supplies (and golden apples), and head to level two: more zombies, less room to run. After level two you leave through a hallway of lava, grab more supplies and drop down a pit to enter level three: more zombies, even less room, obstacles, and lava! If you survive level three, you win and take the hugely long (level three is at bedrock) spiral staircase back to the surface. Meanwhile, death house resets itself and is ready for the next victim  player to enter.

Sorry, they're not in death house. They're searching caves for wool.

Once the kids got over their initial fear of death house it became the most popular mini game we made! I had more than one kid insisting that my husband should put the plans online so they could build their own death house. I'm so proud of my husband and his redstone skills! And there was a massive amount of that stuff wiring the whole thing, let me tell you!

Working our creative marketing muscles!

And that was our Minecraft Madness program, in a nutshell! The age-range was possibly the hardest I've ever worked with, but oh so rewarding! Pre-teens are quick to criticize and slow to listen, but when they like something they let you know beyond a shadow of a doubt; and this program was definitely a hit!