Cranberry fest......

This past weekend on the coast in Bandon was the Cranberry Festival. Bandon and nearby towns host many a cranberry bog....from what I can see the majority of them sell to Oceanspray. The festival was great fun - parade Saturday morning, booths, car & tractor show, petting zoo, musical entertainment - Old Town was hopping....parking was at a premium but our cottage being close enough to walk is a big plus. All I bought at the festival were some cranberry food related items and they are all very yummy....and then there was the Oceanspray booth giving away cans of cranberry seltzer and dried cranberries.

Two of my favorite places in town were having sales for the weekend. The haul above was from The Wool Co. I found a cute ear flapper hat pattern made with super bulky yarn - two yarns were bought for these projects for a couple family gifts. I couldn't resist the Noro yarn (upper left)....not sure what will be made with that yet. And then the best buy of all are all those skeins of baby alpaca laceweight yarn from Cascade Yarns. The shop is discontinuing Cascade so it was 50% off. And that chartreuse is one of my favorite colors! Not sure what these will become but scarves/shawls come to mind.

A stop was made at the quilt shop too - Forget-Me-Knots Quilt Shop. This is a great quilt shop as are many of them up and down the coast - quilting must be big over there. They've recently renovated the upstairs for quilt retreats - there's a kitchen, bedrooms to sleep 8 and bathrooms and a nice big work area for everyone's sewing machine, there are cutting tables, ironing boards, etc. It's very reasonably priced too. Ok, so what I bought - not going to describe the patterns because if I get on the ball they'll make a few gifts, couldn't resist the dragonfly fabric (for what, who knows right now) and those rolled up sets of fat quarters - love those colors! I also bought something I haven't bought in years - an actual cross-stitch kit. Usually I would buy the pattern, the fabric of my choice and I have hundreds of skeins of  DMC embroidery floss in my stash. But I haven't found a cross-stitch seashell pattern that I like and I really like the one in this kit. Not sure when this will be started......too many other things on the to-do list right now but I've got it for when I'm ready. After I left the quilt shop I ran over to the Oddfellows Hall to see the quilt show, very nice. Now I'm showing my ignorance but what are Oddfellows.....my imagination isn't too flattering because I know a couple odd fellows! (update - ok I looked it up if anyone else is interested - Oddfellows)

Finally, I couldn't close without just one picture from the parade. This float holds the Cranberry Court (Cranberry princesses). I'm not sure which one was voted queen. They were madly waving at their friends standing right there in front of us. The parade was full of crowns - the cranberry court, the queen & king of cranberry food, Miss Oregon and some others I have no clue what they were. So, if we win the fun old car in the raffle here in GP for the foster kids I've told Sam that we (Bailey included) will have to be in the Cranberry Parade next year doing the beauty queen wave and throwing out tons of candy. He's not too worried since I only bought one ticket.......