I won two third-place ribbons at State Fair!
I am pretty proud of both. The lace shawl category was the most competitive at the fair, so to even place in it meant a lot; and my work was literally pale beside the two winners. If I hadn’t added beads, it wouldn’t have been in the running. Takeaways: I need more interesting yarn, harder and darker so it shows off the lace pattern, and I was lucky to win anything with a shawl that only had a lace border. Also, some booth at the fair apparently sells laceweight alpaca yarn.
The fox paws afghan came in behind two sold color lace-patterned afghans, and there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m not interested in making solid-color afghans. I still count it as a major win because the judge is very particular about loose ends, and if I had not woven every end in perfectly I would have been out of the running altogether. And fox paws is nothing if not loose ends. You change colors every 2 rows … there must have been about 800 loose ends in that afghan, and she looked for them all and did not find one! She also asked me about the pattern and color choice, which is very unusual at a fair judging, so I went away feeling I had gotten all the attention I needed.
All in all a good day. Perhaps the most amusing part of it was listening to fair judges try to explain steampunk — there was apparently quite a fandom contingent this year, and one of the winners was a wonderful steampunk jacket that used a door hinge as a closure. And there was debate about the inclusion of a two-piece steampunk costume in bridesmaid dresses … I sat next to someone who won for a Frankenstein hat and lost with a pair of socks that included intarsia in the round, so I learned how that is done. The two red pillows I wondered about were almost in a class of their own, but lost out to a third pillow, and the elderly gentleman’s mirror frame took best of its class. And a good time was had by all.
