Creative Zone...

I just returned home from an afternoon of helping children with a craft which had them creating azaleas from their handprints. This is a well-known and often used craft in the pre-k world - atleast the handprint part is. The child traces his hand with fingers extended, then cuts the shape out. To construct a flower,, all that need happen is a rolling up of the handprint into a cone shape, and attaching a green pipe cleaner at the base of the flower. Simple.

Enter the Creative Zone at the Bayou City Art Festival. Around 10 or so craft sessions, with children and adults sitting down to paint, glue, draw, cut, tape, color and generally have fun together. And then all around the outskirts of these tents, are the "showing" artists, actively and not so actively, trying to sell their wares, and to look enough different that someone will fall in love with the uniqueness of what they do.

Add to that environment musical entertainment, food of every nationality, and a maze of people of every sort. I love this event. Metal mesh dresses, sculpture covered with flattened bottle caps, slices of burled wood intricately carved. And now, an exhausted museum worker puts her feet up, and closes her eyes. Sleep will be sweet.