Ready to Shop? The Yellow Daisy Festival Starts Thursday

Get ready to shop, craft enthusiasts: your big day is almost here.

The 43rd annual Yellow Daisy Festival starts Thursday, September 8 at , with two very important things on its side: shoppers who come faithfully year after year, and decent temperatures. The forecast doesn't call for anything much higher than 82 degrees.

Jeanine Jones, public relations manager with , said 200,000 people are expected Thursday through Sunday, Sept. 11. Yellow Daisy is the park’s second most attended event, after the Fourth of July, she said.

“I think it’s one of those rites of passage into fall,” Jones said, adding that the down economy hasn’t hurt attendance, but it has caused some crafters to “look at their business a little differently." If people aren’t buying $100 to $200 pieces, for instance, some have found that creating something to sell in the $20-40 range might work better.

With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, new to the festival this year is the “We Remember” tent, where a number of artists have donated work. Proceeds from the sale of the artwork will go toward the nonprofit organization HeroBox, which needs postage to send care packages to troops around the world.

This year’s featured artist is Charity Elise, from Tucker, whose custom artwork will be on Yellow Daisy brochures and other materials.

Once again, the park’s chief of police, Chuck Kelley, will aim to make the parking situation a well-oiled machine.

Kelley rents a helicopter to see parking spaces and the traffic flow from a bird’s eye view, and radios what he sees, including available spots to police on the ground, so they can send cars to open spaces.