A tour of the cow shelves

 As the cow shelves are now in place and properly festooned with cows, I thought I might allow for a quick tour of the contents.

I have a lot of cows, and they are all (ALL) gifts: people say, "I saw this cow, and I thought of you!", so I add it to the collection.  When I started changing offices a few years back, I realized I couldn't keep them there anymore, so I moved many (but by no means all) of my cows to my front porch.  They took over the space, and became a bit of a tourist attraction.

Of all the cows I have, the ones below are the reason that I decided to build a set of cow shelves:  a neighbor who doesn't know me except to walk by and say "hi" gifted me with an adorable, tiny cow-themed tea set. Together, they're small enough to fit in the palm of one hand, and I was worried they'd get lost and overlooked in the melee that had become my front porch.  About a year ago, the idea of cow shelves planted itself in my brain.

The cows that needed a nice home
and a good place for a spot (heh) of tea.

Coming up with good material for the shelves was the next adventure.  Finding the time to build the shelves turned out to be much less of a problem than I thought it would be: once I found the right lumber, I kind of couldn't keep myself out of the basement, because I was so jazzed about putting this all together.  In fact, now that the shelves are done I keep wandering down to the basement and realizing that there's no projects I'm working on right now, darn it!  I think I need to come up with something good soon.

At any rate, back to the cow shelves: as fall was starting to poke its head around the corner, I was thinking I needed to get serious about making sense of the too-short, too-wide boards in my basement if the cow shelves were going to become a reality before winter lumbered in (heh, lumbered; didn't mean to do that one).   And then, I did my usual post-dinner walk-around-the-block on a trash day, and saw someone had put out a the curb an answer to my prayers.  What had seemed to the put-ers to be a set of no-longer-needed bed slats were, secretly and in disguise, actually the perfect material for a set of cow shelves that fit snugly in my front window, locking in almost with tetris-like efficiency. Whoop!

I think I spotted a cow shelf!

A bunch of white paint that the previous house owners had left behind (and that was starting to glom up, so clearly needing to be used) turned out to be excellent for most of the decoration; a bit of chalkboard paint and purple paint from previous construction and decoration adventures allowed me to add spots.

The hardware (screws, nails, and one or two hooks) was also scavenged from other projects.  I debated adding more shelves for more cows to sit on, but then decided I liked the idea of suspended cows even more.  This leaves open space in the middle of each shelf, and also adds to the kookiness quite appropriately, I think.

These jars remind me of the awesome and iconic Gary Larson Far Side comic panel, showing "Wildlife Preserves".  

Since I didn't want my cow shelves to be like everybody else's cow shelves (as my husband keeps quipping), I enjoyed adding some other quirky elements.  I mean, quirky beyond just the fact that there are dozens and dozens of cows, and that some of the spots are purple spots, and that there are cows in jars.  I wanted to add "pass throughs", and might add more of these later, but for now, there's a lone cow-head-pencil that pokes through one set of shelving. 

The pencil cow is just passing through . . . 

There's a cow broom, and a drawing of cows done from my granddaughter's thumb prints. 

. . . and more cows hanging and sitting around.

Up above, there is a cow garland.  The "rope" is made from a strip that was supposed to wrap around a large computer monitor (someone gave me that about three decades ago, long long before laptops ruled my world), and then I safety pinned lots of other stuffed cows to it.  

The cow garland hangs above.
The "I heart cows" sign was a Christmas gift, too.   

And probably there are more cows that I didn't photograph, but I think this is enough to give the basic idea of how much fun I'm having with the way my porch is shaping up these days.  

Contemplative cow.