Enchanted Library 5.0

And so it begins (really it has already begun) but today we began set and costume design for our 5th Annual Enchanted Library program.  I’ve posted about Enchanted Library last year, so check it out if you are unfamiliar with the idea.

This year’s theme is Mother Goose rhymes which coincides very nicely with our Family Place Grant, the Mother Goose Fair we had in April during our Family Reading Month, and our dedication of play space in September.  This year it seems we have focused a great deal on early literacy and with a number of our patrons coming from other countries, many are unfamiliar with the Mother Goose rhymes many of us grew up with.  The rhymes we chose for this year include:

1. Hey Diddle Diddle,
2. a combination of Humpty Dumpty and Jack and Jill,
3. Little Miss Muffet,
4. The Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,
5. Mary, Mary Quite Contrary,
6. Three Men in a Tub, and
7. The Three Blind Mice.

All seven of our scripts are written and we’ve begun planning and organizing the props and costume we have, and (happily) realized that because we have so many things our work load is relatively light this year.  We make most of our backdrops, props, and some costumes even out of cardboard.  We have found an amazing “box” guy who works for a courier service delivering furniture for Pottery Barn.  I just give him a call and ask for a couple of empty boxes and he drops them off at the library!  It’s super awesome, because I don’t have to call around to a bunch of stores or figure out how to get them to the library.

So for this year, we needed a very large shoe for The Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, an egg costume for Humpty Dumpty, a dish and a spoon costume for Hey Diddle Diddle,  and a tub for Three Men in a Tub. It’s truly amazing what you can make out of a cardboard box, a little paint, and a lot of imagination.  Check out our works in progress…

I’ll keep you posted as our work continues, it should be a lot of fun this year and we hope to get a large crowd as we have in the past.  For us that means about 400 people over the course of 2 1/2 hours!