Silo Heart Banner, 2019

2019 Silo Heart Banner.

While 2019 marked our ninth year here, it is technically our tenth season of operation and, thus, this is our tenth banner. During our usual brainstorming session, I joked that we should do the heart banner from 2010...

2010 Heart Banner.

...but it seemed weird to repeat a design no matter how much we loved it...and we DO very much love that design; it's become sort of our "third logo" (after the oval and circle logos) and the graphic of our silo with a heart banner (below) has shown up on various Small Pond projects (both real and imaginary)...

Silo logo.

...so then I suggested, jokingly, that the logo of the silo with a heart banner should be on the tenth banner. We laughed. And then decided that it was just crazy enough to work both as a humourous and and appropriate approach. But I can guarantee that our 20th and 30th banners won't be an ever-decreasing heart-silo fractal.

Gridded.

After the successes we had using tape and spray paint for the Triskelion, the Don't Give Up, and the Snowy Owl banners, Krista and I used the same technique for this year's banner. This time, though, the grid was more carefully plotted and tighter overall, giving us a more accurate graphic than last year's Snowy Owl (I take the blame for any proportional weirdness on that one).

Taped and Drawn.

We decided to enlarge the heart for greater visibility and impact, and I free-handed it.

Spraying the silo.

Krista once again took care of the painting duties in the workshop.

Spraying the heart.

Old puppets and lanterns monitor the progress.

Removing the tape.

Next to the raising of the banner itself, this is probably the most exciting part: seeing the design revealed for the first time.

As usual, the best shots of the banner are obtained as the sun goes down.

Don’t Let Your Silo Go Naked: How to Make a Giant Banner

At Small Pond, we believe that small is beautiful.  But that doesn't mean that we don't think BIG, dream BIG, and enjoy making ridiculously BIG stuff.

We made this banner in celebration of the grand opening of Small Pond Arts on May 23, 2010.  Our first question when setting out to make it was exactly how big should it be?  We knew our silo was BIG – anyone could see that – but we had no way of actually measuring it. So we measured as much as we could with a tape measure (10 feet), then guesstimated that was about a quarter of the silo's height, so it was about 40 feet tall. In order to create something large enough to suit the scale, we figured the banner should be about 20 feet tall. Anything smaller and the banner would look like a postage stamp.

Look waaaay up!

I’d been saving white tablecloths and bed sheets for a while, and we scrounged a few more from a thrift store. The red fabric was left over from two previous projects: stilt pants and puppet clothes. Lucky for us,  Milé's mother had just bought us a new sewing machine, and even luckier, my youngest sister, Caitlin, was coming to visit – and man, that girl can sew.

This is NOT the new sewing machine… this is Sew Awesome, which we picked up at our favourite store, County Traders

I didn’t want to buy any more fabric than what we had. Not only are we on a fairly strict budget, but using what is at hand is part of my artistic philosophy; I enjoy making things from recycled and freecycled materials wherever possible.

With the material that we had, we fit it together like a jigsaw puzzle, configuring it into a 20 foot by 10 foot banner. We pinned it together in sections in the living room; there was nowhere big enough that we could lay it all out – nowhere clean enough for a white banner, anyway.

Caitlin sews up a storm

Caitlin set about sewing this monstrosity of white sheets together at our ample dining room table, stitching, double stitching, and triple stitching for strength. It gets pretty windy up here at Small Pond, and so durability was everything. I washed the red material and hung it on the fence to dry – we didn’t want any bleeding hearts on our silo.

"Wasn't it hard to hang on to the side of the silo while you were sleeping?" - Krista's Uncle Dan

When the pieces were all sewn together, Caitlin sewed the heart into the middle. She made the heart double-sided (like you would make a cushion) and turned it inside out, giving the heart a nice edge and perfectly-formed shape. Finally, she sewed channels along the top and both sides of the banner. We fed heavy rope, recycled from our dismantled electric horse fence, through each of these channels, and tied the ropes together where they met at each corner of the top. We used 100 feet of rope along each side – it had to reach from the outside bottom of the silo, all the way up and over the top, and then down again to the bottom inside the silo, with plenty of extra rope at each end to be secured to cinder blocks.

As much as we made this banner as strong as we could, right from the beginning we had to accept that this banner would be a temporary installation. No matter how well we built it, there always existed the possibility that one morning we would wake up to find that the banner had simply vanished, whisked away by some gale force bandit of this windy island. (Spoiler alert: three weeks later, the banner is still there in all it’s glory. Good sewing, Cait!)

One week before the party, Team Silo (Milé, Guy, Caitlin and me) woke up early, and carried the banner out into the sunshine.

Using duct tape, we secured a rock to a length of binder twine and then taped the twine to the tops of the two ropes. It took a while, but Guy managed to hurl the rock up and over the silo wall without too much trouble. We hauled the banner up, two of us inside the silo and two outside. The wind was picking up at this point and the ropes at the top seemed to be hopelessly tangled. After struggling with it for some time, I was forced to admit that we’d made a mistake by throwing the ropes up together: they needed to be thrown up separately so the banner would be held open. Failure is part of many creative processes… and so we took the banner down.

So now we had two rocks, taped to two pieces of binder twine, taped to two pieces of rope… and Guy limbered up and started throwing. Fast forward… and the rocks had been thrown over in the right locations, and we were hoisting the banner up and into place. The ropes were tied to the cinder blocks and adjusted so that the banner would hug the silo as tightly as possible.

The banner was made exclusively from recycled materials – barring the thread, which was new – and cost about $20 and 3 days to make and install.  All of our visitors love our silo even more now, and so do we.  I have a vision of knitting a giant, woolly silo cozy by the time winter rolls around (frenetic knitters, please contact me!). There are many neglected, naked silos dotting countrysides across the land; now will someone dress them, please?

Big Fish Make a Big Splash

This past weekend we hosted the Grand Opening Party (aka The Big Splash) at Small Pond Arts. We had picture-perfect weather and a tremendous turn out, welcoming about one hundred friends, family and neighbours over the course of the weekend.

Prior to the party we’d been working hard to get the place ready for visitors. The outhouse was stocked with toilet paper, there were extra blankets and pillows on hand to accommodate people sleeping on every couch and floor, and a showering ban was put in place to spare our well and septic tank from the extra demand.

Then there were the finishing touches to be put in place.  I installed our custom light switch cover in the kitchen…

Milé painted our new mailbox…

Guy drew a map of our immediate environs to help visitors find their way around…

Caitlin organized the time capsule station…

We decorated crazy ginger-bat, ginger-sheep, ginger-alien etc. cookies (a Dalby sisters tradition)...

And we even dressed up our silo with a 20-foot banner bearing the emblem of a heart!

We had a number of visitors arrive on Saturday, and by Sunday, car after car was pulling into our field.  People stepped from their cars bearing gifts of food and plants, wide smiles on their faces.  We couldn't help but smile back; finally, we were welcoming our friends and family to our special place, our dream, our refuge: the place we call Small Pond Arts, the place that has always been intended to be shared.  It was wonderful to hear people express their enthusiasm about the place, and a joy to take them on a tour around the house and farm.

For many of us, the burial of the time capsule - to be dug up 25 years hence, in 2035 - was one of the highlights of the weekend.

We decided to bury the time capsule under an arbour in a garden just beside the gallery. The weekend saw the height of lilac season, and my three sisters decorated the arbour with the fragrant purple and white flowers.

We gathered our guests in a semi-circle on one side of the arbour. Milé and I gave a dedication, and it went something like this:

MILÉ: We’d like to thank everyone for coming out today to celebrate the Grand Opening of Small Pond Arts.

KRISTA: We have friends and family who have come from all over to share this day with us and we really appreciate the effort they made to be here, and their continuing support and generosity towards us and our dream.  We also have many new friends and neighbours here today. In just 3 months of living in Prince Edward County we have met so many wonderful people, which really speaks to the warm and welcoming nature of our new community.

MILÉ: Today we are burying a time capsule together. More than 30 people contributed items to the capsule, including messages to the future, artwork, photographs, jewelry, a local newspaper, and information about the Clarke family whose home this was for 87 years, and after whom Clarke Road is named.

KRISTA: We are planning to open this capsule in 25 years, in May of 2035. I know that many of us feel some anxiety when we think 25 years down the road. We wonder what our lives will be like, who will still be around and who we will have said goodbye to, and we worry about the state of our planet and the many serious problems that face us.

MILÉ: But today we bury this capsule without fear and worry. We bury it in a spirit of hope and togetherness. For us, Small Pond Arts is at its very beginning – and to begin is a beautiful thing. May this home be filled with artists who in their own way make the world a better place, may it be filled with love and laughter and creativity, and may our friends and family always feel welcome here.

At this point our guests were invited to step forward, and each threw a spade full of earth into the hole. 

Milé continued: With this capsule buried until 2035, let us each pass over it, as we step together into the future.

He and I kissed, and hand in hand we stepped through the arbour. Our friends and family followed behind us, individually, as pairs, and as families.

We greeted them on the other side, welcoming them to the future with warm embraces.

Together we spent the rest of the day eating, drinking, wandering the fields and woods, meeting new people and talking to old friends. As the evening came on we sat around the campfire, waved sparklers in the air, and we danced and sang and laughed.

A final thank-you goes out to everyone who came out to celebrate with us and to those who sent their well-wishes from afar. Finally getting to share the place we love with so many of our nearest and dearest made it a very special time for us, and a weekend that we will not soon forget. If you haven't had a chance to visit yet, we hope you'll consider coming to see us really soon.

Thanks to my sister Brittany Dalby for most of the great pics in this post.  I’ll be blogging in more detail later about how we put together the banner and the time capsule, just in case you want to make your own.

Until then, may you have a most pleasant future!