May: Steampunk and Inventors / Inventions Display

Did you know that May is National Inventors' Month? I had no idea (apparently it was just moved from August to May, you can read more about it here). I was trying to find something cool to display during the first two weeks of May and I luckily found out about National Inventors' Month, which gave me an awesome excuse to create a STEAMPUNK display!!

I have been wanting to do a steampunk display for a very long time, but we never seemed to have enough steampunk genre books to complete the display. Recently I have noticed that we were purchasing more steampunk books for the Upper School and the Middle School has always had a ton. I asked the Middle School Librarian if I could borrow five books for the display and she graciously said yes! Finally I had enough books to create an amazing display!

With the help of our parent volunteers and out student volunteers I created three displays. One is focused just on steampunk. The second is focused on books that cover a broad range of inventions through the years, or focuses entirely on a countries inventions.... nothing too specific. The third display was books that focused on specific inventors and/or inventions. The National Inventors' Month theme really inspired me to tie inventions in with steampunk and I could not be happier with the results.

For the decor I drew up a bunch of gears. I chose a different color theme for each bookcase/display. Steampunk had silver, browns and blacks. Broad inventions were dark purple, blue and burgundy. Specific inventions/inventors was hot pink, lime green, blue, yellow... (I really liked how the traditional steampunk with silvers and browns turned out the best).

Here are some templates of gears if you want to create your own (Our student volunteers were so helpful with cutting these out).

I then created two signs, one for the steampunk display and one that I printed out twice and used for each of the other displays (I would have made separate signs for each display but it was a lot of work and I ran out of time).

I placed the gears in groups throughout the display, I tried my best to match gears up so they looked more legit.

That is all there is to it. I hope you like the display. There are so many examples of steampunk displays out there, I found a lot on pinterest! Please feel free to use any of my signs/templates!