West Side Nut Club Fall Festival!!

The first fun thing that happens around here in October is the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival in Evansville, Indiana. (Click on the link to find out all about it) It is supposed to be the 2nd largest street fair in the country, second only to Mardi Gras, and lasts for a whole week. People are everywhere, they have different types of entertainment passing thru the stage area, parades, carnival type games, and rides. My favorite part is the food! My mouth waters just thinking about it! We went Monday night and plan to go back this Saturday.

Blocks and blocks are lined on each side with food venders selling any kind of food you can imagine. I had a portabella fajita, fried pickle spears with marinara, sliced caramel apples, and a frozen banana with chocolate and cherry sauce. Some of my bunch tried some of the wierd things they had, like my husband had a 'gator tater' which was a baked potato with bar-b-qued alligator meat, cheese, and sour cream on it; I thought it smelled like vomit and was, oh, so glad I'm a vegetarian!! My 12-year-old boy followed his pizza burger with a 'icky licker', which was a sucker with a cricket purposely embedded in the center! They also sold scorpion pops, which I think he's gonna try when we go back Saturday. My girls ate 'normal people food' like vegetarian corndogs and big pretzels. Seriously, the food there is just amazing and they sell nearly anything imaginable.

Yesterday I dyed that lace weight yarn pretty darn close to the mossy green color I was after, and even achieved the sort of mottled effect I was trying for. I'm not such which of the things I tried actually caused it, but it worked, so that is fine with me. It took me about an hour all together. First, I made the worlds strongest coffee and brewed three teabags, poured the strong mess into a bowl, and soaked the yarn for about 10 minutes before nuking it in the microwave for three 2-minute intervals. That made a really nice shade of dark tan. Then I mixed 6 packets of Lemon-lime Kool-aid - which is really neonish, if you know what I mean - and diluted it with a large amount of the coffee I had drained off the yarn, then renuked it a few times. Then I drained it and poured the rest of the coffee tea mixture over the top of it and let it set a few minutes; I think this is how I got the slight varigation. I rinsed it off, but I wanted it a bit darker, so I mixed a little more fresh coffee and tea, to which I added about 2 tablespoons of ground sage, then I soaked the yarn in it and renuked it three more times. I think the sage helped the color deepen, but I'm not sure. After using a mild soap and rinsing it off, I hung it up to dry overnight, and balled it up this morning. The sage made it kind of gritty and took a while to rinse it off, then when I was using the ball winder, I think the rest of the residue came off, since there was a sort of dark green sage dandruff all around it, but I couldn't feel any on the yarn after that. I think it is a pretty nice sagey moss color. I can't wait to see how it knits up, as this will be my first time knitting with lace weight yarn.