Planning seasonal decorations for our Kidron, Ohio retail store is a big job. With 35,000 square feet of space–and many of the merchandise rooms under high ceilings, our decorator has her work cut out for her! “I plan the decorating here for the seasons and holidays, so I’m always searching for ideas,” BJ Trader says.
“Christena Imhoff (one of the store managers) told me that we were going to use snowmen for the the store’s country Christmas decoration theme this year. It really takes larger items to be noticed in this large store!”
“I got the idea for our wooden snowmen from looking on Pinterest. We have a lot of old, unused wood here, so I asked Carl Croskey, who helps me a lot on these projects to round me up some. I drew two patterns. One was Dudley, and the other Al Heart. Carl cut them out, and I took them home and began to assemble the snowmen. There were many steps involved. They were sanded, and I double-coated with white on the bodies, the black hat and carrot nose. There’s a welcome sign on Dudley, and a Christmas tree on Al Heart. I hand painted the details and they were complete. We made 12 of Dudley, one for each department in the store, and 6 of Al Heart for various areas.”
The project took quite some time. After the research and getting the patterns cut out, BJ explained that the snowmen took 14 hours to build. “Each one is about 4 feet tall. And then I started on two snowmen especially for the Stove Room. I just completed Smokey and Little Joe at the end of October. They are made of stove pipe. Smokey is 7′ tall.
“Have you heard the old saying,”necessity is the mother of invention”. We had a budget of $200.00 for the snowmen, to decorate the entire store. So we looked at what we had and went to work.”
