Christi's Creative Corner: Fair Time!

It's County Fair Week and for the first time in 12 years, I have NOTHING to do! It's actually a little depressing. We used to spend the first half of the summer gearing up for this week and then spent the entire week making trips back and forth to the fairgrounds for all the different activities DD participated in. It was also usually the week that I needed to spend taking care of gardening things...........pickles, berries, peaches, sweet corn...........all needing to be done the same week as the fair!

I did help one of my piano students prepare for her demonstration which she did yesterday. It was on quilting! She did very well and placed second!

Our first couple of years at the fair were spent when DD was a clover kid. She got to take 4 things she had made in to talk to the judge about. Then that first year of membership we jumped in with both feet! She took many, many projects to show and ended up winning the watch for high point exhibitor.

She also started participating in the fashion revue, dog show, and did her first demonstration.

I still remember it. She made peanut butter treats AFTER she cried because she didn't want to get up in front of all those people!

Here is the first dog show! Magic is so old now and doesn't get around well at all. He suffered through many years of the dog show, having dog project meetings in our yard (all the other kids loved him because he did what he was supposed to), and even participated in the best dressed category..............

Here he is dressed as a hot dog with DD as the chef!
Even after he retired from the dog show, we took him to it one year just so he could see all the kids!

I enjoyed the projects as much as DD........cooking, sewing, arts & crafts, quilting, scrapbooking...........

I actually have photographic proof of DD working on a rag quilt project!

And fashion revue............I can't believe now how many different outfits we would take for that! And then have to put them all on again (very quick changes) for the fashion show. I still remember getting the phone call after we got home from the judging and before we went back for the fashion show informing me that DD had won in 4 of the five categories she had entered and that she would have to choose one of those to go to state in.............shows how much I know............the outfit I liked best was the one she didn't win in!

I wonder if all this fashion revue stuff is why she hates to dress up now?!

This was the skirt and vest outfit she went to state in and even placed second in state. It was really cute. She wore it the first time we took her to the New Theatre Restaurant in Kansas City...........with high top red converse tennis shoes since she had outgrown those black flats!

Over the years, she tried many different projects.......aerospace (we still have rockets to shoot, and a PVC pipe potato launcher that can send potatoes way out across the field), agronomy, amphibians and reptiles (I let her get an outside turtle and she created a habitat for it............I was smart though and arranged for the turtle and habitat to be donated to an elementary teacher for her classroom at the end of the fair!), cat, dog, home environment, computers, knitting, crochet, electricity (I still have a very long heavy duty extension cord she made), filmmaking, photography, gardening, ham curing, camping, even shooting sports one year...........

woodworking, sportfishing, wildlife (we still have the bat house she made), robotics

cake decorating............

robotics kind of filtered in to the cake decorating last year...........
rabbits............and showing rabbits............

and bringing home the loot from winning! She even got to help show goats for some friends one year...........

In some ways, it's nice not to have to worry about all the things going on during fair week, especially when it looks to be a hot and humid week, but really, we do miss it. Fortunately, DD has a part time internship at the extension office, so is getting her "fair fix" and getting paid this year!

AND maybe, I'll get some things done during fair week this year............I did finish my Civil War fabric scrappy stars and have them pinned together in rows. Just need to cut some sashing to start sewing them together.

I also couldn't wait to see how this project was going to look............started placing it on the design wall even though I still have some components to sew together.