Well, we (Michele, Christie, Leslie and I) survived the Island County Fair once again!  We had lots of fun, and spoke with lots of great people.  (WELCOME to those who may be visiting here for the first time!)

Of course I have several souvenirs to remember the 2010 Fair by:  a house that looks like a hurricane hit it as I grabbed *this* table and *that* trinket, and *this* sample and *that* tool.  And piles and piles of scraps and supplies to sort through.  Most of the booth contents have made it no farther than the garage so far, so that means that for the time-being the StampMobile has been banished to the driveway….. which probably isn't that big a deal anyway since it's filthy after having sat in the dust for a week and then *really* turned into a hopeless mess with Sunday's sprinkles. 

So I've definitely got lots to do to get life back on track.

But in the meantime I've come down with a cold…….which I suppose was bound to happen after shaking dozens of hands and handling hundreds of kids' grimy passports, lol.  Last year we had the H1N1 scare going on at Fair time so I was using hand sanitizer every couple of minutes.  This year I guess I was a bit more careless- and get to pay for it afterwards.  Oops!

Anyway, in between picking through and straightening up the messes that extend in every direction, over the next several posts I'm going to share some of the projects we featured in our booth.  The Fair's theme this year was "Island County has a Fair – E-I-E-I-GO!"  So, as has been our usual practice, we built our booth's main displays around that theme.  (We've won awards a couple of times for doing that – although not as often as we *should* have, given we're generally the ONLY commercial vendor who promotes the fair's theme, lol.)  Anyway, this year we spent several months "thinking" about the theme, because it was definitely the toughest one ever…. and thanks to an idea my Dad ultimately thought of, we've spent the past couple of months hard at work preparing our displays.

So the bulk of our display depicted "things people enter into the Island County Fair" ("Island County has a Fair"), and then our give-away pinwheels and our nametags echoed the "E-I-E-I-GO" element of the theme.  When the fair opened and we once again saw that we were the only commercial booth to decorate to the theme (that we could see, anyway), we knew we probably had the "Best Use of the Fair's theme by a Commercial Vendor" ribbon "in the bag", so to speak. 

But it's never a good idea to count one's chickens before they're hatched, and it appears ribbons were awarded based on different criteria than indicated by the score sheet they'd sent us only a couple weeks earlier. 

So we have no award ribbon to show y'all this year – and given that our theme-efforts have only been recognized 2 of the past 5 years (in spite of virtually no theme competition among our peer vendor booths), we've decided that this will probably be our final year of trying.  Promoting the Fair's theme adds a TON of work and time…… and consumes space and money that could otherwise be used to market our businesses more effectively.  So next year we may have an entirely different focus.  Stay tuned to see what's in store; we're excited about the possibilities!

So for those who weren't able to visit us, we had 6 shelves of "things people enter into the Fair":  quilts, fruit, cakes, candy, flowers, and animals.  And all of those projects were constructed of Stampin' Up! products…. as were the blue ribbons that were also part of the displays.  I'll be sharing those projects here in the coming days.

Our top left shelf previewed an exciting product that will be available September 1 – and can be seen in the upcoming Holiday Mini Catalog:  FABRIC that coordinates with our Designer Series Papers!  Christie is the quilter on this year's booth team, so she created this pinwheel-design quilt (which coordinated with our give-away pinwheels), out of one of our packages of new fabric.  (We'll be carrying "extra-wide" fat quarters; pieces measure approx. 28" x 18".)  This particular collection is called "Candy Cane Christmas".  I love it's fun stripes and polka dots in Real Red, Blushing Bride, Baja Breeze, and Garden Green.  And doesn't that Real Red button in the middle add just the right punch?!?

And here's some more good news!  Christie has said she's willing to teach this quilt this upcoming season – if enough people want to take the class!  So if you have an interest in taking this class, please either leave a comment here or email me directly and let me know! If we get enough interest, we'll do it!!!