Wall Book Display: Not Your Grandmas Fairytales

Hello Friends! I hope your day has gone by swimmingly so far.

This post is in regards to my current book display in our young adult/teen room. Now, because we are a small library, there isn't much space for a full display in our teen room. I still wanted to highlight books though, because book displays are so beneficial to those who aren't quite sure what kind of genre they prefer. 

So what do you do when you don't have space for a book display? Well a book wall of course! You don't need any physical copies of the books themselves, just a copy of their covers and a fun theme. 

For my first theme I chose modern fairytales, and below is a list of the book titles I gathered for this project:

- The Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer
- The Witch's Daughter by Paula Brackston
- The Stork Trilogy by Wendy Delsol
- Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
- The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
- Splintered by A.G. Howard
- Mirrored by Alex Flinn
- Entwined by Heather Dixen
- Drown by Esther Dalenso
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgentern
- Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
- Enchanted by Alethea Kontis
- A Court of Thorns And Roses by Sarah J. Maas
- Princess of Thorns by Stacey Jay
- The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman
- The Wrath and the Dawn by Renee Ahdieh
- Cold Spell by Jackson Pearce
- Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson
- North of Beautiful by Justina Chen
- Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce
- The Siren by Kiera Cass

Next the only thing to do was print out pictures of the covers and put them on the wall.




Now I will say that when I change the theme and books I will probably put something behind them to make them stand out. I am not quite satisfied with this project, but it was fun to make and I can always improve upon things.

Well, I believe that is it for today! Feel free to comment and tell me if I have left out any books or if you have an idea for the next theme! Talk to you soon,

Karah

Chalkboard Wall: Library Style

                                         

Do you know when you've just finished a display and see patrons walking by without even glancing at it? All of that work you've done, and nothing seems to stand out. Well, we have a wall of events that hadn't been doing well. You have to walk past it in order to get to our circulation desk, but even in that prime position people were glancing but not stopping to investigate.

After mulling it over for a couple of weeks, and doing some serious pinteresting, I brought the idea of a chalkboard wall to my director. Well she was all for it so away we went!

First, we bought chalkboard paint, paint rollers, and masking tape from our local Sherwin Williams. I had done some research before and quite a few reviews online said that the spray paint did not work as well as the can version, so we got the quarts for our project. The product we used was Krylon and below is a link to the amazon reviews:

Buy product here

If you want to make your own chalkboard paint, I've found an easy follow video for you:

Ok back to the paint we used. We read the directions on the back, which were easy to follow and quite informative, so I suggest doing that before moving on to paint anything.

Next we used a ruler to mark our dimensions on the wall. This is important before blocking out anything with tape, because if the tape is even a little bit crooked it shows and looks terrible! (I might have tried to eyeball it first so I'm speaking from experience) I just measured 6 inches in from every side and made a small mark with a pencil, then took a yardstick and periodically made marks to create a dotted line box. After that I lined the outside of the pencil marks with masking tape so that when I painted I covered them up.

Now when you paint, all of the instructions online said that rollers were a better tool then regular paint brushes because you want the wall to be a smooth as possible. This being said, I'm sure that if you used a brush your wall would still turn out fine. The wall we started out with was fairly smooth to begin with, so I didn't sand or even out the texture before painting. After a thin layer, we left it to dry overnight then I came in the next day to paint another layer, Over the weekend would be a prime time to complete this project.


Stop! This next part is soooo important I promise! Do NOT draw on your shiny new wall yet! you see, there's this weird little thing called "seasoning" that you should do first. you just take regular white chalk and cover the whole area you painted, then you take your hands and rub all over that so you make sure the chalk fill in the pores of the chalkboard paint. Because it is porous, if you don't season the wall first the original artwork you draw will imprint on the paint and you will see its outline forever.


After seasoning I just took a damp cloth and wiped the excess chalk off and voila! Chalkboard wall! You can hang papers using sticky tack, color with chalk or chalkboard markers. BUT be careful about the markers, and maybe try them on a corner first, because some have problems coming off the wall when you try to remove them.



Let me know what you think and if you have done anything like this! Have you used chalkboard markers? do you have any tips when removing them? I'll update you when we change our lettering and signs.

Bye for now!