Kids weave prank into Lotus in the Park project

Film negatives, candy wrappers and strips of plastic table cloth popped out of eight orange plastic fencing panels.

Decorated with all recyclable materials, the panels hung under a tent at Lotus in the Park on Saturday as part of the art camp booths.

Lotus in the Park is a free portion of the annual Lotus World Music and Arts Festival. Located in the Waldron, Hill and Buskirk Park known as Third Street Park, this part of the festival offered Bloomington residents daytime concerts by artists featured in the weekend’s schedule.

Visitors to the booth could grab materials from seven silver bags filled with red, blue, green, purple, yellow, orange and white strips cut from used shopping bags, table cloths and six-pack rings. The panels would be used later that night as a barricade at the Lotus Festival.

Three of the panels began as part of a project through the foundation’s Lotus Blossoms program, where students at schools in five Indiana counties were asked to create aboriginal creatures on the fencing with black materials, said Deborah Klein, development director at the Lotus Education and Arts Foundation.

But besides giving visitors a creative outlet, Klein said the panels taught the purpose of recycling and gave visitors an idea of how much they waste.

At one section of three panels, however, two of the children decorating decided to try something different.

With blue yarn, Mora MacLaughlin and Eliyah Zayin connected the panels together, stringing the yarn around the panels’ borders and tying it in multiple knots to make them hard to untie.

“We think if we do enough here, they won’t be able to cut it again,” MacLaughlin said as she tied another piece of red plastic to a panel.

Their plan: tie together three fencing panels so when Lotus Education and Arts Foundation volunteers tried to separate them, they’d forfeit and leave them as one.
“This is so tied and knotted and stuck together,” MacLaughlin said to Zayin from the opposite side of a panel. “We should get other kids to help us do this.”

Zayin did not respond. Instead he was focusing on tying his plastic strip to others that had already been tied to the fencing.

“And also, another strategy of mine is tying them to the ones on here already,” Zayin said as MacLaughlin rounded the corner, heading toward the silver bags for more strips. “Do you see them all tied together in between there?”

“No,” MacLaughlin said.

“Exactly. They’re never going to know.”

About 2,000 people attended the seventh annual Lotus in the Park, Klein said, including 500 to 700 kids. Throughout the day, many of them came through the weaving booth.

“It’s fun to see the parents get involved because the kids see them doing it, and they stay longer,” Klein said.

Outside the weaving tent, children ran through a pile of hay, stopping to sit and toss it in the air. Zayin and MacLaughlin focused on their knots, still busy at work.
After about half an hour, MacLaughlin and Zayin had tied plastic strips of every color around the black borders of the panels.

“And personally, I think it looks kind of nice,” MacLaughlin said.