Seasons of Joy

This is the first of several post about the festival and what I created or co-created for the Festival of Trees, which benefits Primary Children's Hospital. As Children two of my Kids, Holly and Scott, both were under the care of this Hospital. As was one of my nieces, Emma, They are some of the lucky ones as the hospital was able to help all three of these kids become heathy adult with fairly normal lives. Thank you to the doctors, staff and everyone involved with this awesome hosital and I hope that the moneys raised from this event help other kids grow into adults.
For many years I and Holly have been doing projects for festival of trees each holiday season.  In 2016 Holly came up with an idea for a wreath display. By the time we talked it over, there was not an end cap available for the 2016 Festival, so we decided to put it off until 2017. I got on line the first day you could register for spots in the festival (July 1, 2017) and put in a request for the space we wanted. After several emails back and forth between myself and the head of the wreath committee, we were granted the space we requested. On the first weekend of Oct I went to the mandatory displayers meeting and then we were off. Holly came up to help a couple of times at my house were everything was assembled.
Seasons of Joy wreaths were something that had never been done at a festival before. We proposed doing a display of four wreaths, one for each season.
we started with 4 wire frames

Then turned my crafting room into a natural disaster area

as we constructed the basic frame work for each wreath

trying to make each majorly different

This was the winter base wreath

this was the sumemr base wreath

This was the fall
Under each wreath we planned to do a small display that represent the season

my supplies for the winter display

my scarcrow and accoessories for fall

a basket for summer

and a planter for spring

After the basic wreath's were decorated, I added lights to each of them. I choose 4 matching sets of fairy lights for them

I also had gotten three out door lighted 4.5 foot trees to place between the wreaths

Winter

The whole set set up on a bookcase I have in my basement, so i could get an idea of how they would look

summer

fall

spring. Earlier when I was showing the base for each season, spring was missing. This was because the wire was the base and spring flowers were place to fill in.

The whole set unlit

then we move it to the expo center the Monday after Thanksgiving. Here are close up of each on the doors at decorating day. This is spring

winter

fall

summer
Here are the four doors, wreathes, and displays after we finished setting up on decorating day. The festival opened for the silent action and decorator walk through the next night. When Holly and I got there an looked at the display, we realized that the committee did not have a lot of faith in the appeal of this project. Usually when pricing a starting bid, they will take the price we tell the it cost to make FMV and then add some more. When we got there they were priced at exactly what we got as a tax credit for materials used. This made both of us a little wary as to how will it would sell.
This is how it looked that night
By the end of the bidding time it sold for over $3100, almost four times what it cost us to make it. It also had had 32 bids on it. This gave us a very joyous feeling and justified Holly's belief that it was a cool idea!
All in all a rewarding experience for us and a great deal for the Primary Children's Hospital who gets all the money from the profits of the festival.




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