State Fair

This post is going to look like a re-run of the county fair -- in fact, I'm using the same pictures, just changing the ribbons. If I wait until I can get all the stuff back together with the ribbons, I'm never going to get this done. There aren't 24 hours in a day any more. I'm certain something has happened to the physics or something and there are only about 6. But -- I digress -- the State Fair was held very nearly a month ago (September 10-20). I demonstrated tatting on four of those days -- three evenings from 6 to 9 and one day from 10 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon (but I took the whole day off work, lovely). Here are the pictures:
I ran out of categories in tatting and had to enter my tatting-covered purse in the "large bag" category. I'm not much of a seamstress, and I don't think they knew I used a worn-out pair of jeans on purpose. I did get a comment on it "Lots of Work!!" Well, yeah. It was interesting to see the difference between entering it in miscellaneous tatting in the County and entering it as sewing in the State (especially when it was the tatting that was new, not the purse). I'm going to be more careful about picking categories if I do this again!

The only new things I entered were a bookmark (there is a category just for tatted bookmarks!) and a "wearable motif". The bookmark is "Honor" from Sherry Pence's The Exquisite Collection of Tatted Butterflies with an added tail to turn it into a bookmark. The judges liked it. That was good, because I like it too. The wearable motif is my original pattern for a t-shirt decoration made with buttons. For this shirt, I made single diamond motifs to match and sewed them on the sleeves.
The State Fair gives money prizes. In the categories in which I entered, they pay $3.00 for a first place and $2.00 for a second place, third and fourth places get ribbons. I got 6 firsts, 2 seconds, and a fourth in Home Arts and 1 first in Creative Arts. I am a rich woman now. [uh-huh, as if] I got one check for $22.00 from Home Arts and a check for $3.00 from Creative Arts. Considering it cost me $11.00 to enter all that stuff, ending up with $25.00 felt pretty good. In the first flush of ...well, actually, greed... I thought maybe I'd get out the list of categories and start now to make something in every one. But then I noticed one was "tablecloth - tatting". Uh-uh, I'm not tatting a tablecloth! My sister suggested I purchase a small doll table and make a tablecloth for that. I don't think the judges are that liberal, really, I don't.