I have some knitting and fiber-related stuff to share, but I haven't taken any pictures so I'm offering up a picture of Katy from last summer when she was still a little bit of a thing.

The Ohio State Fair was pretty interesting. The only thing that I would have wished for were more sheep and wool related exhibits and events. There was a relatively large sheep barn full of Shropshires and Dorsets. Very cute, very white sheep. But where were the Shetlands? or even Merinos? There weren't any to be found. I think that the sheep part of this show was definitely oriented towards meat sheep. Though the Dorsets do have beautiful wool and many of the sheep were covered, so their wool was wonderfully clean.

There were some lovely shorn fleeces on display. I seriously thought about buying one for about five minutes, but decided not to. The prettiest ones were not for sale and I still have at least half a box of Solomon's wool left to process!

In the Arts and Crafts Building, there was a small exhibit of hand-knit entries. The "Best of Show" item was a purply-kind of thing with some scarf yarn thrown in as accent. Unfortunately, it was folded in the display cabinet, so it was hard to get a good idea of what it looked like. My favorite item was a very pretty blue and green fair-isle sweater that was someone's Masters Knitter project.

My favorite exhibit of hand-made items were those submitted for the hooked wool competition. There must have been at least 20 entries and all of them were absolutely beautiful. Some were even better than that. Unlike the hand-knit exhibit which only had one or two stand-out items, the hooked rugs were just lovely in quality of worksmanship and in design. There was what looked like a very small square stool or ottoman with a pattern that was so densely hooked it looked like velvet.

And, yes, there were fried twinkies and fried candy bars for sale, but we passed on those and settled for a blooming onion.

Oh my!

I almost forgot to mention the bunnies. There must have been at least 500 of the cutest little creatures that are to be found on this earth in the rabbit building. After careful evaluation to determine the ultimate in cuteness and softness, I decided that my favorites were the Mini Rex rabbits.