A Walk In The Dark At The Park

Sean and I got our craft on last week for the Illuminares Festival at Trout Lake Park. In all the time that we’ve been together, we never broke out the paints and glue gun and channeled our inner Martha Stewart. Not including our annual pumpkin carving, of course.

But that’s exactly what we did to prepare for the lantern festival. We were both pretty psyched that it was moving back to its original outdoor location at Trout Lake. Due to a new community centre being erected, the festival had been moved the past couple of years, first to Crab Park in the downtown eastside, and then indoors at the convention centre – hardly ideal locations.

And for my first time participating, I wanted it to be as midsummer festival-y as possible.

For my lantern, I drew inspiration from Linda Brecht’s exquisitely made paper lantern. So very lovely and girly. I painted my lantern 3 shades of blue and glued the flowers, diagonally across the entire lantern.

Here we are with our finished masterpieces:

We got to Trout Lake when the sky started to go black, all the better to view candle lit lanterns. But to our surprise, although there was hella lot of people attending, there weren’t many that came armed with lanterns. I would guess about 90% of the thousands and thousands of people that showed were without light. That’s a really high number.

I’m sure the thinking was, “Oh, I won’t make a lantern this year. I’m sure they’ll be lots of people with lanterns there.” But when you get everyone thinking like that, then you got yourself a pretty dark event.

Surprisingly, on the organizer’s side, there weren’t as many displays to see either. A couple of trees were decorated with paper lanterns, but no way near as many in the past years. I think that with the festival being relocated every year due to Trout Lake being out of commission, it lost steam in attracting and keeping those exhibitors who go all out with their creative displays.

However, Sean and I still had lots of fun walking around in the dark, with our lanterns in front of us lighting the way. And keeping everyone around us at a healthy distance. You know me and my crowds.

But next year will be the event’s 25th anniversary and I have a feeling everyone who was there, will want to be participants, rather than spectators. We already have an idea of what we’re going to do next year!