Our top consists of a 4 foot by 4 foot plexiglass cube featuring four “stained glass” Andover landmarks in four seasons:  Town Hall (winter), the Mill at Ballardvale (spring), the West Parish Gate (summer), and Memorial Hall Library (fall).  It is set on a rotating panel and has lighting installed on the interior of the cube.  While we would have loved to have made real stained glass, time wasn’t on our side, so instead we have original photography and artwork designed by our team and printed to commercial window clings that are installed on the inside of the plexiglass panes.  Click the image below to see how these were conceptualized.

We encountered several challenges along the way.  None of us are engineers, but we thought building a wooden frame would be a piece of cake.  We were wrong.  There were several iterations of that design until we found the right one.  We had to call in reinforcements (otherwise known as Steph’s brother Ted) to help us with some of the more involved woodwork for the middle base.  Our original idea of LED lighting strips fell apart, literally, when the strips wouldn’t stick to the plywood and the battery they were going to connect to turned off automatically after five minutes.  Not ideal when our original plan was to be lighting these from the water.  But that’s the whole concept of DI – problem solving!  And wow, did we get our fair share of that along the way.  But it was worth it!