As I have mentioned in previous posts, specifically HOW TO KEEP THE CREW TOGETHER, it can sometimes be somewhat difficult to keep your group together at a massive event. Festivals tend to be pretty hectic, and when you are someone who likes to wander, it can be difficult to reunite with your friends if you haven’t taken the proper steps. Maybe you get lucky, and there is not only cell phone service, but someone to check your message, respond, and then stay in one place long enough for you to find them, but the chances of that happening are incredibly small. So it helps to have something that can be spotted over a long distance, easily and quickly. In the lead up to Snow Globe, my friends and I decided that we were going to make a totem so that we could find one another in the crowd. I wanted to share a little about our experience and some ideas to make sure your totem is not only super cool but easy to stop across a large crowd.

So we all decided to get together and went, with no real plan beyond knowing that we wanted it to light up and look cool enough that we wouldn’t be too ashamed to bring it with us to the event. We probably should have thought it through a little bit more, but the result was good enough that I decided to share a little bit about what I have learned making my very first totem.

The first thing to think about is YOUR BUDGET. If you are cheap like me and have already spent enough on festival tickets this year to make you think twice about paying for anything else, then it helps to have a rough idea of what you are willing to spend going into the process. If you are sticking to something a little on the cheaper side, then come up with ideas before you go to the store. Trust me; you will always end up spending more at the store when you have no plan than when you go in with one. You can even pull together a totem with stuff you already have around the house. Do you have plush toys and old mop handle, you can turn them into a pretty solid totem with the help of some duct tape. Just add a pack of lights to get it glowing, and you’re set for your weekend without having spent a lot of money. If you have a little bit of a higher budget, then think about incorporating some cool elements like crystals and color changing led lights to your totem. I once saw one made from a stormtrooper helmet covered in a million little rhinestones. It was pretty awesome but probably not very cheap to put together. No matter what your budget, it never hurts to have a plan going into making one.

The Second thing to think about is VISIBILITY. When you are designing your totem you need to think about the reason you started doing it in the first place: to be seen. Yeah, it can be cool to have a funny meme printed out on a piece of poster board, but in the dark, I am not sure how helpful that is going to be exactly. I would recommend buying a pack of the battery operated led lights to attach to your totem. You can also use glow sticks and glow in the dark paint, but I would recommend the lights because they are guaranteed to make it easier to see your totem in the dark.

HEIGHT also needs to be a consideration when gathering your materials. Now sometimes it can be great to have your totem super high up, but for most people, I would stick to something about the height of a broom pole. It does the trick to get you up above the crowd, but it isn’t obnoxiously high, which can be kind of annoying. It can be kind of a Goldilocks situation when it comes to height, but I would suggest this rule of thumb: if it completely blocks off a view of the stage, it’s too big.

WEIGHT is another thing to think about. Whoever ends up carrying the totem is going to be holding it up high all night, so you probably don’t want to make your totem too heavy. You want to make sure that you aren’t making something that is going to be torture to lift, so try and stick to lightweight materials. A good cheap option is a metal broom handle. These are lightweight, pretty decently long, and can be found for super cheap at Walmart or Target.

If you like to get really artsy why not try GOING WITH THE THEME OF THE EVENT. As we created our totem for Snow Globe, we decided to make a giant snowflake with holographic poster board. If you are going to beyond wonderland, why not go with an Alice in Wonderland theme? If you are someone who struggles with ideas it helps to have a theme to play off of.

Finally, the most important part of the process is to HAVE FUN WITH IT. Making a totem should be about having fun with your crew and doing something together. Have a theme, turn it into a joke, have a good time and maybe even just use it as an excuse to find out. We had a great time shopping for materials and seeing our little arts and crafts project come together. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you have the most amazing totem at the festival, the point is that you had fun making it and that it makes it easier for all of you to stick together and enjoy the event.