*This post is part of Free for All’s “Making Magic” series, which will focus on Kelley’s exploration of the opportunities in the library’s Creativity Lab.

Many of you are well aware that the City of Peabody has been celebrating 100 years with Peabody 100, a series of events that began with a Family Festival at Brooksby Farm in May 2016 and will culminate with a Grand Ball at the North Shore Mall in May 2017. As part of this exciting line-up of events, the City recently held the Centennial Parade, which included bands from across the country and featured music, costume, dance and the arts. Thanks to the approximately 200 volunteers and numerous city officials involved in the planning, the event was a tremendous success. Now, you may ask,  what does Peabody 100 have to do with Making Magic and learning to use the tools in the library’s Creativity Lab? Let’s take a moment to talk about the library’s parade float.

City organizations built their own floats for the parade and the library was no exception. A group of volunteers met on weekends and constructed a rolling version of the Main Library equipped with George Peabody himself (well, not really, but you know what I mean), and of course lots of giant books! As the person who takes care of the library’s graphic design needs, I get some unusual requests. I’ve spent time gazing at the Sutton Room’s beautiful ceiling to find inspiration for the Peabody Institute Library Foundation’s logo, drawn whoopie pies for an International Festival banner, and even taught two teen guys how to Photoshop themselves into the roles of Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey during the final lift scene in Dirty Dancing. But the design project that will become a part of history is the 52 giant book titles that I laid out and vinyl cut for the books on the library’s Centennial Parade float.

Although the project sounds straightforward enough, it wasn’t. I knew how to set up the titles in Adobe Illustrator, but when approached with the project, I didn’t know how to use the vinyl cutter yet. Details.… Going with an old philosophy that serves me well (most of the time) I decided to say yes to the project and figure out the details later. In this case, saying yes was a true win because I got to learn something new that I will use a lot in the future, and the added bonus is that it’s fun and has tons of creative potential too!

If you’re like I was, you might not even know the purpose of a vinyl cutter, but once you know you’ll realize vinyl cut work is everywhere. Lettering in the department store window? Vinyl cut. The hours posted beside the library’s front door? Vinyl cut. Those peel and stick animals, flowers, and inspirational quotes that people love to use to decorate walls? Vinyl cut. The cool thing about the Creativity Lab’s vinyl cutter is that if you can create a simple Illustrator or Inkscape file, you have what you need to start to cut your own original art! Why use the Home Depot wall art that everyone else is using when you can create something that is uniquely you?

Thanks to a short tutorial from the Lab’s Programming Librarian, I found that the vinyl cutter was an easy tool to learn. Mike showed me how to load the sheets of vinyl into the machine, change the speed and cut pressure of the blade, how to “weed” the vinyl once my file was done cutting, and finally how to apply the transfer paper necessary to get all of those titles onto the giant books in a straight line. After designing, cutting and weeding 52 titles, I officially consider myself a vinyl cutting expert. The best part was that the whole time I was working in the Lab, I was aware of the significance of what I was doing.

Leading up the event, for the purpose of designing the parade’s poster, I was given access to numerous images from the City’s 1968 Centennial events. The moment they were taken, just like those images from 1968, the photos from the 2016 Centennial Parade became important visual documentation of Peabody’s history. And although it’s only a small piece of the big picture, when people look at the images of the library’s float in the future, they’ll not only be looking at a rolling representation of the library, they’ll be looking at something that was created in part in the library’s own Creativity Lab.

Want to learn more about the vinyl cutter? The Creativity Lab offers regular training classes, so you too have the opportunity to become a vinyl cutting expert. Check out the Creativity Lab’s complete class schedule for details.