okra: Ye Olde Blog Update

This weekend I drove to Kansas City to visit my parents and go to the Renaissance Festival. Yay! It was fun. There were a lot of terrible skits, belly dancers, and tights. Lots of tights.

I saw quite a few people I recognized. The "king" is my parents' neighbor and my dad's best friend. My dad made his crown. We got to see him marching around with all sorts of crazy costumed people following him. But the king was not the only neighbor of ours there. I saw the Maupin family from around the corner there, too, all together in costume. One of the daughters, a childhood friend, married one of my high school friends, Jon. He was there, too. He just got back from Iraq; I was really glad to see him. They had great costumes. I especially liked Sheryl's hat.

From left to right: Jon, Jesse, and Sheryl. Bill (Sheryl's husband) was also there, but thought he wasn't "dressed up" enough to be in the picture. Silly Bill.

We had a lot of fun. There were a lot of interesting booths, though my favorite has always been one called Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. They sell woven things, knitted things, yarn, and wool. The weaving has actually not been part of the shop for the last two years. Unfortunately, I found out that they lady who does the weaving got MS. She is shop partners with the knitting lady, who's husband rode in a 100 mile bicycle ride for MS, which I thought was very sweet. Anyway, most of the yarn is hand spun on a spinning wheel and the clothing is knitted by hand. I was oogling over the yarn. My mom bought some wool; she has a spinning wheel and is learning to spin wool. She also bought be a green knitted poncho. I know, a knitted poncho sounds kinda dorky, but it's cool, really.

I love all of the colors together. Most of these are also hand dyed.

Going along with the wool theme, they had quite an array of fuzzy things at the petting zoo. Sheep, goats, ducks, a pig (maybe a pig isn't so fuzzy?). My favorite was the llama.

There was a kid that was even more excited about the llama than I was. You can see him waving at the llama, off of the edge of the photo.

There were a lot of strange sights at the Ren Fest. The strangest by far though (and this is saying a lot) was a booth, well, an elaborate tent actually, stocked with something called Chameleon clothing. One garment of clothing had so many zippers, velcro apitures, and who knows what that it could be worn as a whole chart of hilarious running shorts, dresses, pants, and capes. It also turned into a sleeping bag. It was ingenious in a way, but not so much that it wasn't a little freakish. I felt like I was trapped in some sort of hippie infomercial. And to top it all off, the woman working the tent (which probably turns into a hammock or canoe) was wearing one currently in pant form. She excitedly announced, "My pants turn into a dress. Wanna see?" I should have said yes.

Of course, we couldn't just go straight to the Ren Fair, no, we stopped at the thrift store on the way. Hehe. I got a sock monkey! With strange floppy dog-like ears. He's strangely likable. Since he looks like some sort of strange monkey-dog creature, I started calling him M-Dogg. But he's not a very good rapper (too soft), so I guess I'll have to think of something else. He's in the washing machine now, swishing around. His ears are probably flopping around in there.