Another Decorating Event

Thursday, Feb 19th, South Stake hosted an Abraham Bicentennial Program. This article is out of the River City WeeklySomehow, (DeLillian's fault, Anita's friend) Anita ended up on the committee and that meant me too. Anita, and I were brought in to decorate/scene set. So, as you know, Anita is the designer, and I am the engineer. This was way too easy for me until Thursday morning. Because we were both busy, Anita decided to get all the table cloths at Signature Party Rentals. They were awesome, and told us to just select all of the things we wanted and they would make us a deal. And they did. We decided to rent the 6 foot columns with the top and bottom pediments and cross over piece. It looked very presidential, I thought. We also rented drapery and the posts for that. One set (Blue) we used behind the scene for President Lincoln and Mary Lincoln. and the other set of posts we used our own drapery to set a scene in the memorabilia/museum area. The other rented drapery (White) we used to mask off the ends, behind our display board. We use that display for our own home shows at work. We used our big display to cover the ugly padded wall under the basketball hoop, and it also had built in lights for the paintings, it worked great.

The Transtrum's, Terrel and Charlotte, were in charge (chairman). They are awesome people and I can't imagine how much time they had to put into gathering all the memorabilia. And Linden Bateman, he even got display cases from the Museum of Idaho, to use. He was something like the "Display Chairman" not sure on that, for the Museum of Idaho. He is the most enthusiastic person I have ever met!!!

This is Brother Bateman and above, on the far left is Charlotte and the right picture is Terrel.

We (Anita and I) only had one meeting with the Transtrum's and Bro. Bateman. At that meeting we decided, how, what and where, the decorations would go. The night before 50% of the plan had to be changed. So, Anita and I, being so able to roll with the punches, decided the stage would be better anyway to set up our Abraham Lincoln greeting area. See for yourselves. The curtains add tons to the design, just like it was meant to be. Yep a happy accident. Charlotte's sister made the bunting (great job) and we added it to our scene. We brought our lighting, and red carpet and trees. Instant White House Garden.

The guest speaker, David LeRoy, said it was the best presentation he's seen in the whole state. True or not, it was a nice compliment. Skip Critell, our Abraham Lincoln presenter, said it was an excellent turn out. The chapel, overflow and gym were packed and standing room only.

You know those sound elimination squares that are in all LDS church gyms? We spent 4 hours pleating and tacking up all the fabric that covered those. My thumb is still numb from the ones I could push in and my fingers are swollen from hitting them with the hammer while putting in the ones I couldn't push in.

Brother Bateman kept saying "All these hours of work for 2 1/2 hours of program" I was getting a little discouraged after a bit. But he was being very complimentary. All in all it took Anita and I and Charlotte and Terrel, 8 hours to set it all up on Thursday and a couple hours the night before to haul it all in. My cool nephew, Ryan helped us too, haul all of our stuff. Thanks Ryan!

This is really a lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair! There's my hubby with Abe and Mary.