You Can Do It At a Trot,

You can do it at a gallop.  You can do it real slow so your heart don’t palpitate.  Just don’t be late, do the Puyallup.

Yes ma’am, we went to the Puyallup State Fair this year; complete with three small children in tow.  For those of you not fortunate enough to live in this heaven we call Western Washington, Puyallup is pronounced “pew-al-up”, sort of rhymes with gallop.  This and other unusual place names is how we tell locals from out-of-staters.  Sequim is another good test;  locals know to say “squim”, the furriners say “see-quim”.   Some people mistakenly think we keep these unusual names to honor our local native people.  Wrong, so wrong.   We do it so we know who the visitors are.

If you live around here, every year in mid-September that silly song runs through your head non-stop.  And you just have to go.  There are cows, chickens, rides, deep-fried Twinkies (really!).  There are more varieties of fancy pigeons than you would ever believe.  There are 4-H girls and boys showing their horses and pigs.  I had a whole conversation with some very cute noisy geese with huge orange bills.  I forget what variety they were.  The only sheep I saw were in the children’s petting barn; I think the main sheep showing events are next week (yes, the fair goes on for weeks).

We ate, we petted, we admired, we saw the lady doing cowgirl rope tricks.  Any other time of year this would have been unbelievably corny.  I spent serious time in the craft pavilion admiring the many lovely quilts and knitted items.  And watched the end of the fastest fingers contest.  There were about ten women entered; they each got a ball of yarn and a crochet hook, and were timed to see who could crochet the fastest.  Here are a few of the knitted things:

I dared John’s son George to ride the Extreme Scream with me.  I would have one piece of advice:  pee before you try this.  You get shot straight up in the air at about a million miles an hour, then dropped like a rock.

I don’t look nearly as terrified in this picture as I really was.

As this is a KNITTING blog, here is another finished project.  I have had the yarn and pattern to make fruit hats for John’s grandchildren for a long time.  While we were hanging out here this week, I started and finished an eggplant hat for Penelope.  It started out as a blackberry hat, but the little bobbley things were just looking too weird for me.  The yarn is Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran.

Yes, that’s me in those fashionable slippers and robe behind her.  We were all still in our jammies waiting for pancakes when I took these pictures.  More pictures here.

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Author: Lorette

My name is Lorette. I learned to knit in 1999, and took up spinning in 2009. I'm a physician specializing in internal medicine, and live in the Pacific Northwest. Enjoy my blog! View all posts by Lorette