Shoshi Small wasn’t bothered by the giant butterfly perched on her face Sunday.
Small, 14, spent her weekend shuffling through jewelry, trying on African masks and munching on a vast array of delicacies at the 29th annual Custer’s Last Stand Festival of the Arts, with colorful butterfly wings painted on her face.
Last weekend marked Small’s 13th trip to the festival, and she said it has gotten better every year.
“There are more things to look at, more people, and the bands are good,” she said. “It’s nice to listen to while you’re walking around.”
The weekend festival transformed the area around Main Street and Chicago Avenue into a rollicking street party with live music, about 30 concession stands and more than 450 arts-and-crafts booths and stores.
Bands played on two separate stages, one set up on Main and Chicago and the other on Washington Street and Sherman Avenue. African drum beats, slow jazz and alt-country echoed through every inch of the festival, while barbecue smoke filled the lungs of festival-goers.
Faint odors from the vast variety of food – ranging from Vietnamese fried rice to Greek gyros – swirled around in the hot summer air. Fresh lemonade stands fortified every street corner surrounding the station, offering a cool – if somewhat tart – respite from the sweaty action.
Booths were also set up to let people partake in some arts and crafts. One stand let people fill bottles with colored sand, while others sold paintings, sketches and wooden dolls that nestle inside oen other.
Small worked at a face-painting booth on Saturday and Sunday. She and co-worker Tiffany Clotfelter, also 14, said they each painted about 100 faces over the weekend, inlcuding one girl who asked for a pink lizard featuring blue legs, a purple tail, green hands and tiny sequins.
“She said she wanted to design her very own lizard,” Clotfelter said.
Vendors also came in from all over the Evanston and Chicago area to hawk their goods to the crowd. Shops offered summer clothing, cultural goods and CDs and old vinyl records.
Lia Corinth, an Evanston resident, trolled the tents looking for a new djembe to replace the one she had worn out. She grabbed one of the African drums and started thumping and slapping it.
“This is not the best one I’ve seen,” she said.
The same could be said about the festival, in her mind. She said it was smaller, more poorly attended and less pleasant to the ear than past festivals.
“And there’s too much jewelry,” she said. “Everything is jewelry.”
Ald. Steven Bernstein (4th), who represents the ward the festival appears in, also said he’s noticed a few changes over the past few years.
“Historically it’s had more community flavor, more neighborhood participation,” he said. “Now more people from outside (Evanston) are coming in, which is a mixed blessing. It’s always good to get people into your town, especially if your town that looks like Evanston.”
