Students take locker decorating to the next level

Rhydian Talbot/Staff Writer

Open up the locker doors of any given student, and you’d come across an assortment of generic knickknacks: a couple leadless pencils, a tattered assignment, maybe a forgotten candy wrapper or two, but open up the locker doors of seniors Gwen Farber and Kaitlin Izer, and you might get blasted backwards by the organized chaos within.

For these two girls, locker decoration goes a lot farther than simply slapping up a picture of friends here or there; their lockers reflect unique interests, experiences and ambitions, all within the confines of a standard-issued holding cell.

In a corner of an oft-forgotten hallway, the inside of Izer’s locker bursts with much needed life.

Her personal space combines a love of vintage-chic imaging with her favorite television show, Glee.

Self-made and personally edited collages from picnik.com showcase the program’s characters amongst similarly themed bookmarks and magnets.

“There is no life without Glee.

I love it so much, and I picked this theme for my locker because it fills me with so much glee.

I look at it on a bad day, and I feel happy again,” Izer said.

Izer also shares an instrumental locker with Farber and fellow senior Abby Rolinger.

The three string players were assigned a closet-sized locker in the orchestra wing to simply house their instruments, but Farber took it upon herself to transform their space into a life-sized scrapbook.

The walls are adorned with collages of vacations, hand-drawn comics, ticket stubs from concerts, movie posters, college banners, random magnets, inspirational quotes, celebrity obsessions and pictures upon pictures upon pictures.

“It’s an explosion of my personality.

I like being able to look in and see all the pictures.

It just makes me happy,” Farber said.

Stemming from an “obnoxiously” colorful bedroom, Farber’s creativity and passion for visuals spilled over into her locker junior year, a veritable home away from home.

As a senior, she decided to step-up her decoration craze, layering every square inch of locker space with the ephemera of her life.

“Last year I decorated my locker, but it wasn’t as crazy, just the Harry Potter posters.

This year, I went all out.

It’s senior year, and I needed to have a little fun.”

This versatile space doubles as a shrine to the unrelated while serving its original purpose by storing scholarly supplies.

Foregoing the doldrums of math wing metal lockers, Farber keeps her belongings concentrated into the one storage space.

“Besides the random collection, I keep all of my school stuff in here, too.

I don’t think I even know my assigned locker combination,” she laughed.

Though fit to burst with odds and ends, a bare spot of untouched locker surface peeps through pictures and posters every so often.

These unmarked areas currently serve as a sort of blank canvas, allowing Farber the possibility of future decoration expansion.

“I still have space, and it’s a project that’s a work in progress.

It’s just whatever I feel like adding.

No matter what, though, it makes my day every time I look in there.”