The history of this dumb sign

It's Glastonbury 2022 and Dani's first ever Glastonbury. We wanted a way to find each other in the crowds, but (unsurprisingly) didn't order a flag in time. We thought, why not make a full-sized sesh lollipop stick? In the hunt for materials, we went to one of those 'everything' shops in London. Some rolls of brightly coloured tape and a broomstick were perfect. We found some cardboard in a bin and got to making.

We started with cutting out two big circles, and covering them in colourful tape. Next the lollipop pole, with black and yellow alternating tape. We printed out the letters on Nick's parent's printer, and stuck them on using pritt stick - nursery crafts style.

The letters didn't stay on because pritt stick is useless, so we used a bit of sticky back plastic to hold them in place. Using black tape, we stuck the signs to the pole with tape and gave it a black border - done!

It didn't hold up well. We had to reattach the sign to the broom in the healing fields. The tape wasn't waterproof and a bit of late night rain really gave it the wobbles. Lots of fun though.

v1 was great during the day but at night? Pretty useless.

We bought some LED strips - the kind that make your bedroom look like you film gaming videos - so we could light up the sign at night. We stuck down the LED strips behind the cardboard so that the SESH letters lit up.

We also wanted it to be taller; we had an aluminimum velux window shutting pole lying around that you could extend to be really long.

There was also the bonus of it having a big screw on top of the pole, letting you attach things to the very top. We managed to make a camera mount to attach a 360 camera to a rope. It made for some fun vids!

Our first thought was to make one side a discoball. But the problem with a flat disco ball is that it's just a shit mirror. It was concentrating sunlight directly into the eyes of anyone looking at it. Luckily we realised this when we were still at home - it caught the morning light in the flat and nearly took our eyes out.

Lots of people came up to us in years 1 and 2 but they had no way of interacting with the sign. We had the idea of putting a bluetooth LED strip (the ones you see in the windows of off licences) into one side of the sign so people could write their own message on it.

We added some googly eyes so it looked real friendly.

v3 was super heavy, but the bluetooth LED strip worked amazingly well, especially at night - we had to keep it for this year. But we've also gone back to our roots - the humble broomstick. Small and light all day and all night.

The next thing we had to figure out was what to put on the other side. Three years of SESH in huge letters was fun but it felt like time for a change.

Nick started making a website that would allow people to upload their messages directly to the sign. He made a big QR code for people to scan to get to the message page. But it ended up being way too much effort, so he just made this abridged history for you instead. Maybe next time?