Recycling takes on a beautiful form
Published 2:00 pm Friday, October 18, 2019
Maureen Walls-McKay is one of the many volunteers who helped to assemble the bottle cap flowers for the dog park.
The Dr. Erica Geary Dog Park located at 405 N. Virginia St., Farmville has a whole new look. Recycled bottle cap flowers adorn the fence of the dog park welcoming visitors and passers by.
Red Door 104 is encouraging recycling in a unique and beautiful way. Last year, the summer camp students created the “Starry Night” bottle cap mural that currently hangs on the steps of the Federal building across from Red Door 104 on Main Street. This years’ project includes 24 giant bottle cap flowers that now flank the Dr. Erica Geary Dog Park fence on North Virginia Street.
(To see more photos of the project, click here.)
For the past four years, residents in Farmville have been saving plastic bottle caps and delivering them to the studio to help create these public murals.
Audrey Sullivan, owner of Red Door 104, believes that teaching children the importance of recycling by creating beautiful artwork, will encourage them to continue caring for the planet. According to Sullivan creating the flowers was a huge project. Each flower was drawn on 3/4-inch, treated plywood and then cut out with a jigsaw. The edges were all sanded smooth then sealed. Both sides of the flowers were then painted in the colors dictated by the bottle caps available. The caps were then glued onto the flowers and the leaves. Once they were finished, Red Door 104 held a “Screwdriver Party” for the adults, typically after work one evening.
Screwdrivers and pizza were served and approximately 20 people showed up with battery-powered screwdrivers and started screwing galvanized screws into each and every cap. For this project over 6,000 screws were used.
On a Sunday afternoon, Sullivan and her husband Kent Wilhelmi, zip tied all of the flowers onto the fence posts surrounding the dog park. “The whole corner lit up like a Christmas tree,” Sullivan stated.
Next years’ mural is already in the planning stages, it will be a two panel mural spanning 4×16 feet of the High Bridge. It will hang somewhere on the trail — location to be determined.
Sullivan is asking that people bring in brown plastic caps, they are hard to come by and are found on chocolate milk jugs and some peanut butter jars. They are needed to create the wood rails on the bridge.
