Common Ground Fair 2017

Yahoo! Neighbor Shannon, her friend Ellie, and I went to the fair; three former Boulder chicks out for a good time. 

You can't go to the Common Ground Fair without encountering the Fair pilgrimage traffic!

I knew we were nearing the fair grounds upon seeing this sign. My excitement rose exponentially!

I am a sucker for Alpacas!

Check out the babies and their antics;-)

The Fair design for this year was the chicken!

Gee, could that be why I skeedaddled over to the poultry shed first? 

I love looking at the patterns of feathers, and guinea fowl are always so amazingly patterned. But, I must say that the males have rather ugly head dressings, in my opinion. It looks like somebody did a really bad red and white paint job on them! Strange.

Next door to the poultry barn was the border collie exhibition ring. I love watching these dogs work. They are awesome, and this particular farmer does a great job with the dogs. I just took a tiny clip as I couldn't get up to the fence through the crowd. I held the camera up over my head to shoot.

 There was lots to do for children as well as adults. This garden area was a joint effort between the stone masons and the weavers.

Kids could take turns weaving on the Earthloom. Super fun!

I love rocks. There is always a demonstration area where stone masons are working. Here is one nice chunk of granite being turned into something decorative. I had chosen a small rock sculpture of a leaf, to purchase from The Granite Garden Gallery before leaving the fair, but the proprietor was nowhere to be found on two visits to his tent. Bummer. So, I'll have to hope he is there next year. 

I enjoy looking at posters in all forms, and each year we visit the Beehive Design Collective to view various cloth posters about serious global issues. Here is a description of the Beehive Collective:

The Beehive Design Collective is a wildly-motivated, all volunteer, activist-art collective dedicated to “cross-pollinating the grassroots” by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. We work anonymously as word-to-image translators of complex global stories, gathered and shared through first hand conversations with affected communities.  
http://beehivedesigncollective.tumblr.com/about  https://store.beehivecollective.org/#_=_

And then there was the music and dancing. I listened to a few nice songs from this group promoting peace and love...We need more of that these days! And, the end clip was a bit of sweet music by some very talented young people.

Finally, we poked around the Farmer's Market vendors. Mushrooms, veggies, breads, cheeses, and lots more were for sale. Yuuuummmmmeeee!

All in all, we had a great day at the Common Ground Fair.😎