Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Throw Your Hoe Down

This weekend I spent a fabulous day and night at the Hoes Down Festival at Full Belly Farm, the farm that sends me my CSA box every two weeks. There were a bunch of workshops and things that I was really excited to see, but I had to wait for my carpool people to be ready to go, so we got there at 2 pm and missed most of the things I wanted to see.



It was a lot of fun nonetheless, and I spent most of the time with my friend Andra in the kids craft section, making felted wool soap scrubbers and dying silk hankies with natural dyes (onion skin, indigo, etc.).





The festival is a "celebration of rural life;" there was sheep shearing, cow milking, workshops on how to raise chickens on a small scale (which I missed, grrrrrr), and all kinds of hands-on activities like bread baking, corn milling, weaving, etc. There was also a hay fort, which I held myself back from exploring because there were just too many kids.



But we couldn't stop ourselves from doing the grass maze.



There was also contra dancing, and great food and music far into the night. We camped out in the walnut grove and the stars were so intense that we could see the Milky Way.

Here's a video that I took of the contra dance. It looks a bit dishevelled because it is; there were just too many people and not enough space.

2 comments:

Carlene said...

How cool is that? I totally would have camped out in the kid's craft section.

Sometimes I feel like you live on a different planet than I do; I live quite near rural Illinois, and we have nothing like that here. Monster trucks, that's what we have.

Anonymous said...

Wow, I love that video-- that's hilarious. I'm so sorry you missed the workshops!!! I would have been pretty annoyed- darn slow moving young people! I'm glad you were able to have fun anyway. I'm sorry I missed it-- I definitely want to go next year (I promise I won't flake out).