What sort of snowmen do you want to make when you grow up?

This weekend is the Winter Festival where I live.  I will admit that I am more than a bit curmudgeony about many of the events because the weekend brings a fair amount of extra work for me in the non-library portion of my job.  However, I love going to the park to see the snow sculptures.  It's hard to do them justice in a photo because of the lack of background contrast, and (in this morning's case) it often seems to be snowing when I have the time to go and see them.  Here are a few of my favorites from this year ...

The unicorn

I have to admire the technical skill that it took to get up on a ladder to carve out the horn ... unfortunately with the first melt, this sculpture will turn into a somewhat deformed horse.

Cornucopia

Another one that's interesting to me in the skill required ... look at all of that empty air under the horn and how everything counterbalances ... plus it's fun to see a season other than winter or summer represented as those two predominate in the carvings.

 To give you an idea of scale, those blue things are ice candles made from 5 gallon pails, and, yes, they are lit for night viewing.  It's very pretty to see the park at night with all of the candles glowing and spotlights picking out some of the sculptures.

I like the fact that this team chose to use some of their extra snow to make a sign for the main sculpture ... though the carvings are labeled through the festival weekend, they can last for several weeks if the weather cooperates and it's nice for people who didn't get to see them at first to have a title.  Also, the Mesabi East Orchestra was performing Peter and the Wolf this weekend, and it's great to see a nod between artistic entities!

The octopus

Sea creatures always seem to be included for some reason ... not sure why, maybe we're all just longing to go to the beach this time of year!

This is a detail from the largest sculpture which was based on Howard Sivertson illustrations (the man is not quite life-sized) ... if you've ever seen the painting of the cow in the canoe, it was included but I couldn't get a good angle for a picture as the number of people in the park at that point was rapidly increasing.  The big carving is always interesting; my favorite from past years was the engine of imagination - Einstein was driving and Schroedinger's cat was along for the ride.

So, since there's plenty of snow this year for raw materials ... perhaps we should all get inspired by these talented artists and go out to make some snowmen!