TRAF - June 2nd

It's the first day of the arts festival. Following the venerable history of the festival, IT RAINED. It could have been worse. We could have had a torrential down pour. The Origami tent in the family center played host to a surprise visitor, Brent Burket, who posts at Heart As Arena. He showed up early in the day while we were setting up. This picture makes it look like it was lighter out then it was. My camera settings were a little off. Really, it was a dark and stormy day.




The Origami tent is next door to the papier mache' tent. While we remained only damp, the papier mache folks suffered from massive flooding, with the tent roof bulging under gallons of water. The plan is to build giant papier mache' animals and have the children paint them. Even with all of the flooding the artists got a really good start on a couple armatures and started wrapping them in gluey paper. After one heavy rain, all of them were soaked through to the skin. And it got pretty cold.



We didn't get so far as to assemble our first large-scale model in the origami tent. With the help of a group of volunteers, we trimmed additional paper and got a start on folding flowers. You can see the beginning of the field behind Brent in the picture above. The volunteers also helped to fold some cranes that we have suspended from the ceiling of the tent. Pictured at right is Taichi, who is helping out with this project for the festival.







While I was at the festival I took a few moments to look around at the art market to see if any of my friends had rented a booth. I did run into Suz Pisano, who makes accessories. She does really girl accessories, with lots of beads, feathers and other assorted bangles.





Along one aisle of the Artists Market are the booths of a few local galleries. Boxheart is one of them. They have several of Tracy Helgeson's paintings up. They are the ones on the left in the back. I wish this picture did them justice; the work positively glows with color. If you follow the link back to Tracy's blog, she posted yesterday about how much the humidity affects her painting schedule when she is preparing her underpaintings. And you will get a better idea of what her work looks like then you would with my pretty bad shots.

Right now, it's 8:30am. The sun is out and the weather is supposed to be much nicer today. On to folding big (9' x 9') pieces of paper.