Crafty Confetti State of Mind

Anyone who knows us is fully aware that we love color and spend lots of time crafting to create fun + colorful backdrops, props, decor, and more! Today marks our third podcast episode in our latest series on Clint Salter’s Transform My Dance Studio: A Confetti State of Mind. And in today’s episode, we’re in a CRAFTY state of mind!

This blog post serves a companion piece to the podcast. You can head here to listen to it right now and reference each of these images. We go into great detail on each of these crafty pieces in the podcast, but we know that it is hard to visualize them when we talk about them. So listen to the podcast and review these images together to get the full picture…literally!

#rhythmfunwall

Some of you may have heard us talk about the wall we have in our lobby that we decorate several times throughout the year. What started as a small photo backdrop area has turned into an entire wall full of fun. So, we have a big wall centrally located in our lobby that everyone has to pass by to get to the studios. We thought, why not give every dancer a reason to stop and take a photo? There’s a very good chance that photo will end up on social media, which turns into free advertising. So, with each season, we go full out with decorating this wall. We almost always base the decor on our year-end show theme for that year, and then take it a step further to give the theme a halloween vibe, or holiday vibe or Valentine’s Day vibe. You can check out the hashtag #rhythmfunwall to see some of the walls we have created at the studio!

Custom Costumes

From the minute we decided to open our studio 28 years ago, we knew we wanted our performing company/competition costumes to be completely different and unique from other studios. In our early days, things were a little more simple, but we still found ways to create stand-out costumes. Of course, we are big fans of rhinestones, and still to this day use them on almost all of our jazz and production costumes. But in addition to that, we have always liked to take it a step further with additional crafting. Texture, patterns and dimension have always been intriguing to us, so we try to think outside the box when decorating our costumes. In the podcast, we go into detail on some of the different items and techniques we use to create truly unique costumes that might help you on your own custom costumes.

Photo Op Backgrounds

We definitely use our crafting skills big time when we host parties and events! It is a way to create a unique party and while it takes more time, it is more cost effective that just purchasing lots of decor! For our Company Party every year, we craft all the centerpieces and usually a unique and fun photo backdrop. We have shared many of these tutorials on our blog! You just need some imagination, party supplies and a glue gun, and you’ll be on your way! Pro Tip: Re-use these props and backdrops for your dance camps, open houses, company events and more…we have been able to re-use ours over and over!

Photo Shoots

Between Confetti and the studio, we find ourselves holding photo shoots several times each year. And, because we are such theme-driven people, we like to create and craft new backgrounds for each of our photo shoots. There are certainly times when we like a solid, clean background for some shots, but most of the time, we are trying to come up with something completely different from what we’ve created in the past to keep things fresh and fun. In addition to the above photos, you can also scroll back through our Confetti Instagram feed to see some of the other backgrounds we’ve crafted!

Props

We craft hand held props, as well as large props and sets for our shows every year. They add so much to the overall look and really help tell the story that we are presenting. Depending on the prop, we do sometimes have things built and then we embellish them. We personally are more of the embellishers, and we rely on others to construct things if needed. 

We hope all of these photos, ideas and details––both here and on the podcast––provide you with inspiration to create some fun + colorful crafts for your studio! We promise it will be well received and add so much fun! 

You can listen to our first two podcast episodes in this series here:
Branding Like a Boss
10 Ways to Survive Summer