EC celebrates Oktoberfest
EVANS CITY — More than 4,000 people gathered in Evans City over the weekend to celebrate the German heritage of the settlers in the area with the 30th annual Oktoberfest.
Although the rain brought fewer spectators and participants to the parade on Saturday, that did not stop vendors from showing off their hobbies, including artist Marci Gehring of Evans City.
Gehring, who works on a farm owned by her neighbors, uses her free time to create natural home decor to sell at Oktoberfest.
Gehring's art was inspired by her work on the farm: “I was introduced to all of this beauty ... all this harvest was just inspiring,” she said.
Her art uses hard-shelled gourds, which she dries and then paints into various works of art including ghosts, mummies, pigs and the Grinch from Dr. Seuss's work, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”
Hard-shelled gourds can take up to a year to fully dry, which is the first step to creating her masterpieces, Gehring said.
Gehring has been creating natural art as a hobby for about 13 years, using natural media like antlers, bones, corn, flowers and hooves, she said. Her tent at Oktoberfest was filled with Indian-corn wreaths, small ornaments made of gourds painted into skulls and wall-hangings made of skulls and bones from deer, she said.
She's been coming to Oktoberfest for about five years, and said she gets great feedback from people. “Everybody loves it, and they enjoy the tent,” she said.
But she does wish people would leave with more than a new appreciation of nature. She said she hopes they are moved to value the planet in their own ways to protect and sustain nature.
Another hobbyist turned vendor at Oktoberfest was Doug Frishkorn, an Evans City knife-maker who got into his hobby not from his job but out of a need to do something for himself, he said.
Frishkorn has only been making knives for about a year, owning a business called Doug's Knife and Paracord. His mother died about a year ago, and he turned to knife-making as a hobby, a relaxing way to clear his mind, he said.
“I've always liked knives, but my parents wouldn't let me have one as a kid. This is kind of my revenge on that,” he said.
His handmade knives use acid-etched Damascus carbon steel that he imports, along with woods shipped from California to create the handles.
Frishkorn's knives are each unique, and he works with a number of different materials including California redwood, whole buffalo horns and bone, he said. Each knife takes about three days to make, he said.
During Oktoberfest, the Boy Scouts of the Evans City Pack 399 had their own booth, featuring a typical scout project as a recruitment technique: the rain gutter regatta, an activity where a person blows on a plastic sail on a balsa wood boat in a rain gutter full of water. Two people race in separate gutters, and the first to the end of the gutter-length wins.
Andrew Rider, the cubmaster, said the rain gutter regatta is one of the typical activities for the Cub Scouts, boys from first to fourth grade.
