New Freedom Festival 2016

  Happy Saturday, everybody! :D

  Today Stephen and I attended our second mermaid together, the New Freedom Fest in New Freedom, PA. Sue, the awesome gal who organized sticking me in the Koi pond at Ladew Gardens for "Nature! Art! Play!"the week before, invited me to this event as well. Thanks for inviting me, Sue, I appreciate it! :) It was a nice festival!

  There was a swift change of the weather, (the last event exactly a week ago at Ladew Gardens was during a high heat wave) and the day of the fest was supposed to be very chilly, so we decided last minute to have a dry booth. We used the large inflatable kiddie pool that I use for various gigs and placed a black photography background over it, then filled it with strips of blue crepe paper. :)

  Unfortunately, I had never used the background with the pool before, and it was not quite big enough to fully cover it. Oops! Still, we made it work. Stephen and I showed up very early before the event started to give us time to inflate the pool and cut up the 6 rolls of crepe paper to act as "water".  I had three different shades of blue to add some depth, and it looked quite cute! I still strongly prefer a water booth, but in all honesty I'm quite proud of the last minute crepe paper idea, haha. Much better than just an empty pool or freezing to death in real water. The paper was all squished by the end of the event but hey, it worked. :) 

  The New Freedom Fest map is HUGE, all of it couldn't be contained in one screenshoot, so here's what fit, and here's an arrow to show where I was. :) At the time of writing this blog entry you can find the live page on their website here, but I don't know how long the webpage will be active. Either way, the screenshots will be immortalized for our viewing pleasure on this page.

  Here's a zoomed in version of the screenshot so you can see my name a little better on the official map. They did misspell my name as "Mermaid Gypsy" instead of "Gipsy", (I wasn't aware of this until the day of the festival, oops!), but no matter, there I am! :)

  I made quite a few friends. <3 The one I chatted with the longest, Maddie, hung out and blew bubbles for my booth for awhile, which was super cool. I truly enjoyed spending time with her, she was an absolute sweetheart and I felt we connected deeply. We chatted with her and her Grandma after the event as well, and all I can say is I sense a new future mermaid. :)


  Another fun young lady that I hung out with gave me a plastic slinky (how fun!) to keep. Thank you! :D That's going in my treasure box. She was awesome and so fun to talk with, very intelligent and very kind!

  And then there this cutie found my brush in the pool and decided she wanted to hang out and brush my hair for 5 minutes. SO cute! As you can see in the photos, I was not having a good hair day, but this made me feel a little better about it. :)

  Of course, I met many, many other fun people and cool kids as well. It was fun! Here are a couple other photos of me that Stephen snapped during the event.

Mouth full of chocolate bar

 Thanks again to my friend Sue for inviting me to the festival! I greatly appreciate it. :) Thanks for reading everybody, stay tuned for more mermaid adventures.


Love,
Mermaid Gipsy