The Fair!

Once in awhile, we stop working on the house and try to have some fun. (By the way, much house work is happening, despite the fact that I'm not posting about it. I'm saving up all the bathroom stuff until I have a dramatic reveal photo!) Last weekend, we got up rather early (that part was not fun) and drove to Sacramento for the state fair. Fairs are fun! But Sacramento is hot. 107° to be precise.  


The main reason for going was so that I could visit my 3rd-prize winning shawl and collect my ribbon. I'm a little sad I didn't place higher, but it was still fun to enter. In case I haven't forced you all to look at wedding photos often enough, here's the shawl in action at our wedding last June:

the shawl with lots of pretty shoes

it's giant

pattern detail

and a photo where you can tell that we were there, too!

Mildly relevant statistics: It took me about a year to knit (though there was a 4 or 5 month break in there somewhere), and I used 1.41 miles of yarn. 

The fairground has some (air-conditioned!) exhibition halls, and my shawl was displayed with other Creative Arts entries. 

There were lots of really beautiful things! One of my favorites was this poppy quilt. At the bottom of the photo you can see the heads of the knitted presidents collection. Yup, you read it correctly. 

We made a point to see some critters while at the fair. That's what you're supposed to do, right? Besides eat weird fried food?

First we saw some of those happy cows from the California dairy commercials. They did look contented. 

good looking dairy cows

At some point we discovered a barn run by the UC Davis vet school. It was full of super adorable baby critters!

a day-old lamb

2-day old piglets

There was also a 20-minute old calf, but we didn't get a good photo. 

During our fair visit, we ate a deep fried Snickers bar (actually good, even though we didn't quite want to admit it) and deep fried artichoke hearts (our house is 75 miles north of the Artichoke Capital of the World). Our only regret is that we got some mediocre tacos instead of a Twister dog.