Neiman Marcus: Thanks Ants! Thants.

The project: dressing bugs for the winter

I made several sets of mittens for the ants:

All dressed up and looking for food; must be on a date. Just like people!

This ant is motorized so that he looks like he’s trying to get at the giant cake. Or possibly bowing to it. Well, can you blame him? That is some fabulous cake!

This guy’s mittens are a bit hard to see in this shot, what with the red-and-white tablecloth background. The raspberry is motorized to spin:

This ant had been put in before I made their mittens, so I had to climb out on the tube to mittenize him. I dripped hot glue everywhere and broke the giant candy cane’s support threads, but all was righted in the end:

The whole “Yummm!” window:

Those are neiman&marcus candy-coated chocolates, not m&m’s!

 

Over by the “Buzzzzzzz!” window, a naked ant has escaped and is about to carry off any unwary children:

Here is a motorized ant offering a present to a bee. I wrapped a lot more presents than that, but those blasted ants must have already carried the rest off to their hive:

I wired the scarves on the bees so they would look like they were fluttering (also, they’re wearing Santa hats, though it’s hard to see them in any of the pictures):

I got my annual late-night glue-gun burn from putting the pipecleaners around the flower:

The whole “Buzzzzzz!” window:

For a video, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaI6kBVyu00

Neiman Marcus: leaves of grass

The Project: giant blades of grass

 

Foam tubes covered in more foam to make them thicker. The two foams had been glued together, then separated exactly one night before I went to cover them with the fabric:

The fabric socks, as previously pictured in a teaser blog entry:

Here’s the first end result–I had thought the ruching was for all the foam tubes, but it was not intended for the grass; just for the vine part. It was delightfully Dr. Seuss-y this way, but that wasn’t what we were going for.

I put pieces of pipe inside the foam to make it stiff, which made it easier to pull the fabric on. The vine:

Here they are in the window: