Fairy Festival - After Action Report

The first annual Fairy Festival & Gnome Home Building Workshop was a great success and a lot of fun.  Over 50 people showed up to participate and there were tons of smiling faces on kids, parents and grandparents.  It’s great to be amongst folks deeply engaged in their creative process.  The parents and grandparents were as thoroughly immersed in building their fairy houses as their kids - it was much more of an event for all ages than I had anticipated.  

A great team was pulled together to facilitate the event.... Little Dippers Italian Ices set up shop and seemed to be doing brisk business particularly as the day warmed up.  

Dr. Laura Barringer DDS was awesome, as always, in her persona as the Tooth Fairy.  

 

Samantha Birchard from Pittsboro Toys, hosted a chalk drawing contest, sold fairy related toys and generally helping out as needed.  Stacy Gray, a very talented Environmental Educator, facilitated the fairy house building.  Finally, Megan Bolejack, chair of the Pittsboro Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, helped with the event, and brought several people for her excellent Passport to Wellness Program, in her capacity with the Chatham County Health Department.  

We had truck load of great starter materials--bark, feathers, acorn caps, flowers, etc.--to use for the home building, plus an assortment of hot glue guns to hold everything together.  Like any good meal, if you start out with great ingredients it’s more likely that you’ll have a great meal at the end.  A half dozen new homes were built for the fairies and gnomes of the park and many, many more homes were built and relocated to the builder’s homes for their own, local, fairy population.

Caption - Click montage to enlarge

I was most impressed with the creativity of the participants and the imaginative homes that they built.  Judging by the feedback and open smiling faces, it looks like this will be an annual event.  By the way, if any of you participants have photos of your gnome or fairy homes in their new natural habitat, please send them in and I’ll post them on the blog. 

I hope the gnomes and fairies are enjoying their new digs!