Saturday's Apron: Houston County (MN) Fair Winners

I entered 2 aprons in the Houston County Fair this year. One you have seen before, and one I made specifically for the fair. Here they are:


The purple and green one is a clothespin apron. Both are blue ribbon winners, as you can see, but don't get too excited; for some reason, nobody else put any aprons in the fair this year! So they not only got first place, they also got last.

The family did well this year!

Lil Miss A entered black cherry jam, the first time she has ever made it. Our friends Carol and Fred Reese stopped by on their way back home after a vacation in Glacier National Park and brought us a bunch of black cherries that they had picked at a pick-your-own orchard. Lil Miss A made some of them into jam.

A blue ribbon! And she had PLENTY of competition, unlike her mama. I'm very proud.

Here is the Shelf of Fame for the preserved foods category:

Kieffer (he told me to quit messing around and just use his name, he uses it on the Internet all the time anyway) dried cherry tomatoes as his entry in the Preserved Foods category. He cut them in half, scooped out the guts with a watermelon baller, and then dried them on racks on the back porch for a couple of days. We got this idea from Judy Laquidara's blog. And look at that: Second place! I knew he faced stiff competition, because there was a jar of lovely dried morel mushrooms there when I dropped off his cherry tomatoes.

Good job, son!

I entered my red currant jelly but it didn't win any prizes. I'm not really surprised. My jelly is usually cloudy.

And now (drumroll please) comes BARRY STAHL who entered two categories with his ceramics: A woodfired piece (which won a first prize) and two of his bottles (which won a giant purple ribbon)!

He looked around at the photography, scoffed at the judging, and then wondered where the professional photography exhibits were. There weren't any at all this year. Next year we mean to fix that.

Now a little show of some of the other exhibits that I thought were great:

Floral arrangements

Woven rugs. The tan colored one was made of jute twine.

Vikings Stadium depicted as an afghan.

This awesome handbag embellished with tons of old Bakelite and other early plastic buttons and doojobbers. Want.

We didn't stay very long. I am not feeling very well today (I'm supposed to be driving to the Twin Cities right now for my 30th high school reunion, and I'm staying home feeling sorry for myself instead), so it stopped being fun pretty quickly. We didn't even check out the 4-H sheep and they are normally a must see. Maybe tomorrow afternoon I'll feel better.