My last post was brief and quite enigmatic as much of what we were working on was embargoed until the weekend of the Comice itself.
John and I were working on the big arches for the two entrances to the site - the big one was an issue just because of its size, as it was over 2 metres tall and very long. To get sensible sized letters, we had to make a number of stencils for letters that would be nearly 60 centimetres tall. The logo could be projected onto the panel and traced, but any other decoration had to be done by hand. And for the reverse side - the "see you next year, elsewhere" - apart from the fact the letters also had to be pretty huge, there was no guidance, no colour scheme, no theme, so we made it up as we went along.
The smaller arch was more of a problem - no space for projections, too long in relation to its height, and more space to fill in. Our preferred method of doing the letters with packing labels did not work as, and I'm not sure you will believe this, packing and shipping labels aren't brilliant at sticking in slight humidity. The weekend before the Comice it was a real rush to get that one finished, so that I was free for the next set of tasks.
There was a nice video of John working on the arch, but Typepad won't let me upload it, and YouTube has done something silly with it, it seems to me!
Then on Monday and Wednesday (Tuesday was a bank holiday) we started to put up more decorations in the village - up to that point, it had just been bunting and the straw bales, now we had silhouettes of dancers popping up all over the place and a stream of jolly music along the wooden barriers by the village hall.
Then on Thursday and Friday we were on the Comice site, putting up even more bunting, dressing the podiums, decorating the vast numbers of marquees, adding fairy lights, signs and all sorts of other bits, so that the exhibitors had a clear run on the Friday afternoon to get installed. Lunches were served at the village hall for the workers - cold beer has never tasted so good! It was lovely being all together, working to a common goal and getting to know new people.
Then on Friday evening, we were all summoned to the site for the distribution of volunteer t-shirts for anyone working on site over the weekend, a few words of encouragement from our President, and the unveiling of the big arch. There is a video stream of that, but California doesn't seem to want to play ball with technology at the moment - I guess they have other problems - so here is the great arch unveiled, and there was applause, which you will have to imagine.
So after a drink to seal team solidarity, it was home to a sensible meal and early to bed to be refreshed for the event - except that rain was forecast, so we spent the night worrying about how various aspects of decoration would stand up to moisture!
To find out how that panned out, look again in a couple of days' time as I'm not wrestling recalcitrant IT any more today!
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