Butternut Creek Festival celebrates art, community

Items on display included everything from home and garden décor, clothing and jewelry, pottery, furniture, and even homegrown food like honey or medicinal tinctures like CBD oil. The walkways were packed with people Saturday morning especially, hosting a variety of visitors looking for any number of things – or just browsing.

Take, for example, “Flossie and the Fabulous Floozies.” A longtime friend group decided to plan a “girls’ trip” around the art festival and arrived wearing bright neon wigs and sporting fun pseudonyms just to make others laugh – and to be fair, they drew quite a crowd in the time it took for one of them to pick up a birdhouse.

The Floozies are self-admitted artists themselves who spent much of the weekend crafting together in the cabin they were sharing. They found inspiration among the works of the vendors around them.

One of those vendors was Tina’s Tie Dye, which drummed up considerable business that day as the owner, Tina Rice, readily complimented others on their fashion choices. Displayed in her booth were racks of upcycled shirts and jeans alongside freshly dyed dresses, tank tops and headbands.

“I grew up in San Francisco, and when I was in Girl Scouts in 1973, my Girl Scouts leader taught me to tie dye. Every summer, our troop would tie dye for her, and we found out she was selling them at Grateful Dead concerts,” Rice said about her humble beginnings with a laugh. “I just fell in love with it as a child, and I still love doing it.”

Right across from Rice were the food vendors, which also attracted plenty of attention. Nana and Papa’s Ice Cream was a popular choice along with Jamaican fare from Red Hills Catering, which traveled all the way from Atlanta to make the festival.

Susan Cave is local to Blairsville, and this year marked her third time attending the event. Waiting in line at Red Hills, she relished the opportunity to try something new at a festival she has had fun exploring over the years.

“I enjoy (Butternut Creek Art Festival) every time I come,” Cave revealed, citing the variety of vendors, kind people and scenic park setting as reasons she keeps coming back. While she didn’t arrive with intentions to buy anything, she was able to find some crochet to take home.

Others, like Kay Wolf with Local Handmade Pottery, were there for the first time and found themselves already considering returning next year. Having practiced pottery for 16 years, Wolf took up the art after retirement and found that, rather than retiring, she had simply changed professions.

Showing off the horsehair technique, Wolf was happy to explain how the unique patterns on her work came to be by pressing real horsehair and feathers to superheated pottery. While Butternut wasn’t her first show, she was pleased with the curious crowd and echoed Cave’s sentiment that the park provides a wonderful backdrop to a beautiful summer day of selling and shopping.

Meanwhile, Lance Zeigler of Burnt Whisker Forge helped stoke the fires of forging interest in crafting among younger generations. Although originally a woodcarver, Zeigler said he found his passion as a smith, and he was happy to show others how it was done by helping with demonstrations.

“The fact that I can take a cold, raw steel bar that just looks like nothing, and I can give it life and turn it into a delicate rose” is what he enjoys most about his craft. “It’s just like playing with Play Doh at 1,800 degrees,” Zeigler quipped.

He’s been part of Butternut for about 20 years – the majority of its 27-year history – and admits that it has been “a good show for us.”

Over the years, Zeigler has watched the festival grow and change for the better, saying that while some of the organizers and fellow artists have aged out and retired, there’s still “a great group of people” not just when it comes to vendors, but also volunteers who help direct traffic, shuttle guests and care for Meeks Park.