Two fall festivals will return to Heartwood Park in Omaha this month.
The Heartwood Fall Festival and Heartwood Kite Festival will take place over back-to-back weekends. The park will host the Fall Festival Saturday and Sunday and the Kite Festival Oct. 17-18.
The Fall Festival will feature complimentary pumpkin carving, all-day bingo, mini golf and a 10-foot-tall hay sculpture.
Team Nebraska Snow Sculpting champion Matt Seeley and competitive hay sculptor Carlos Miguel Ramirez Pereyra built the sculpture, titled “Harvest of Imagination,” over the week preceding the festival.
Seeley said the sculpture was inspired by the children’s nursery rhyme, “Hey Diddle Diddle.”
“This is the first hay sculpture I’ve ever done,” Seeley said. “It’s kind of my inaugural.
“We (Pereyra and I) worked on this together. It was a team effort, but it was awesome to learn from him and work side by side with him.”
Seeley said he’s glad there are spaces in Omaha willing to host events with cultural and artistic significance.
“I think it’s just incredible, and it’s what we should be doing as a community,” he said.
Seeley will give pumpkin carving demonstrations throughout the festival.
The Kite Festival will take place the following weekend in collaboration with Great American Kites and Events.
Joe Beaver, chief operations officer of Great American Kites and Events, said the festival will feature kites ranging from five to 100 square feet.
“People that attend the festival can expect a big kite show with professional kites in the air, as well as some smaller kites that kids will fly,” he said.
Beaver said the first Kite Festival at Heartwood Park last fall was one of the best of the year.
“The Omaha community was one that stuck out to us out of the 40 different events we had last year,” he said. “Just the community engagement, people really enjoying the community and being out with each other, stuck out a lot to us,” he said.
All events at Heartwood Park are free and open to the public.