One of the things that Steve and I had in common was our love of crop art. I’m not dissin’ other kinds of art, but crop art is just amazing. Seeing how crop artists can blend grains and seeds to make beautiful works wows me every year.
Normally I visit the crop art on one of my alone days at the Fair but this year YA consented to go with me. For those of you who haven’t seen the crop art at the Minnesota State Fair, the exhibit is along the far wall of the farm crop room in the Agriculture building. Because everyone likes to look at every piece of art on the wall and table, there is almost always a line. If you squeeze through, you can stand behind everyone else as they peruse the art. Unfortunately most of the folks who squeeze through then push their way to the front which makes the wait for those in line even longer. Why people will stand in line politely (more or less) for a slice of pickle pizza or a pronto pup, but they can’t bring themselves to wait for crop art, I don’t know. Maybe if we called is crop art on a stick…
I’ve waited in line every year and experienced this phenomena over and over again. I don’t like it, but I can’t see that it’s something I can fix. YA had no such compunction. When she noticed people trying to bypass the line, she stepped next to me (instead of in front of me), blocking the bypass. Then she turned her back to the oncoming traffic – two folks actually tried to get around her – she was immovable. I was considering that she was taking Minnesota passive/aggressive to new heights when she said, in a voice just loud enough “crop art budgers”. I think she may have just taken the title “Queen of Passive/Aggressive” from my mom! From now on whenever I see somebody cut in line, I’ll be thinking “crop art budger”!
Anyway, the header photo is a red ribbon winner this year but I know that Steve would think the same as I do… it’s a blue ribbon winner in our eyes.
Did you ever glue macaroni to construction paper as a kid?
Trail Baboon 
My best effort at making crop art was making cornbread.
C. R. Ayers
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Excellent application of grain!
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I love cornbread. Add butter and honey, then we can just glue it right onto my hips, skipping the digestion part.
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Why yes, I probably did. I also required kindergarteners to do something like that… after we sorted all the colored beans, lentils, etc. into muffin tins.
VS – some years I’ve found a link to pictures of the current crop of crop art. I did a quick search and found this July 27 article on how it’s done…
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/07/27/beginners-try-their-luck-at-a-minnesota-state-fair-favorite-crop-art#:~:text=In%201965%2C%20the%20Minnesota%20State%20Fair%20introduced%20crop,only%20seeds%20from%20Minnesota-grown%20farm%20crops%20are%20allowed.
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Rise and Pick up Grain with a Tweezers, Then Glue it Down, Baboons,
I don’t remember gluing macaroni to paper, but I do have a lovely Christmas decoration from my son that is macaroni glued to cardboard cut into a wreath shape, then painted dark green and sprinkled with gold glitter. It is, of course, my favorite Christmas decoration each year! We spent several happy hours at ECFE art class gluing macaroni and grain to various items. All great works of art, of course. I do remember making a decoration in second grade that was of this child art genre: an ice cream cone painted green, with a gold Christmas ball glued on top. I think that is as close as I came to a macaroni project.
Friday the Master Gardener booth was across the building from the Crop Art. On my break I quickly walked by for a peak, but that was as close as I came to it. It was so blasted hot and humid Friday, and Lou got dehydrated. He had a beer and did not drink enough water resulting in wooziness and disorientation. He sweated through his shirt. Therefore, we got back to the bus ASAP and came home. I did not get to see some of my favorites. Lou declared it his last State Fair.
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Oh dear, that’s too bad about the fair, Jacque.
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I hope you don’t get in an A. H. M. E. D. A. P. P. situation with Lou over this, Jacque.
But what exactly do you do on the Master Gardener booth? Do you give advice and solve problems?
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Yes. It gives me a chance to blab on and on with nice people.
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I stopped by every time I was at the fair but still managed to miss you.
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Define AHD…. then I can tell you.
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From a DrBabooner session in 2013. You are all Dr Babooner so thought you might remember this(well no, I didn’t.)
A lady asked you all if she she should carry on accompanying her boyfriend to every single day of every State Fair. She enjoyed the fair, but. Then she let slip a couple of the buts. One of the buts was, Already Had Enough Mini-Donuts And Pronto Pups. So Dale then referred to her as A. H. E. M. D. A. P. P. (I see I got it wrong last time, sorry). Varying responses from the collective Dr Babooner, as you can imagine. Mine would have been, that my Aunt Christine once observed that if I didn’t want to do a thing, I wasn’t going to do it. True for the most part.
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Thank you for dredging that one up!
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Lordy, I’d almost forgotten about Dr. Babooner! Thanks.
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Er no, I think I did not. And I think from the sound of it it would be on my list of Sensory thingies. I seem to have more of them than I used to, don’t know why. (JUST this side of wack job, at the moment)
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Still got a lovely kitten for some lucky person. Get your free kittens here! (I’ll pay the air fare)
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Snort!!
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I think I must have done at some point but it couldn’t have been very good because it isn’t very memorable. Mosaic art appeals to me and I wish I knew how to do it.
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It looks like Riana De Raad is still giving workshops.
http://www.concretemosaicsculpture.com/
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Wow!
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Beldenville is near River Falls. Rianna’s garden is much more impressive than the pictures on her website show.
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Another local mosaic artist:
https://arkmfa.org/2020/06/15/the-storied-collections-of-judy-onofrio/
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And another local artist. https://www.mosaiconastick.com/gallery
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Husband baked a white sandwich bread yesterday that had lots of butter in the dough (from Baking With Julia) and put in a lot of rolled rye from the miscellaneous grain drawer in the basement refrigerator. I haven’t looked there for a while, but I can only imagine the grains he has squirrel away there. We are expecting highs in the mid 90’s all week, then a high of 66 on Friday. There is smoke in the air from fires in Montana. Today will be an inside day. Husband is really suffering with the heat and his allergies.
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That is 35° Celsius today.
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He sprinkled flax seeds on the tops of the loaves.
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Afternoon-
I’m sure I glued macaroni to paper at some point in my life. Nothing that I remember though.
Never made seed art (unless we decide to count actually planting the fields as art) but when I was a kid and hurt my leg, I got a ‘latch hook’ rug kit. I made a few of those. Course LEGO’s were a big deal but they were just the blocks, I didn’t have all the fancy kits they have now.
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Lego made sense back then, it was simple, but you could use your imagination and build anything. Now it consists of an infinite number of kits that you build according to the plan they lay down, admittedly you could do what Isaac did and make hybrid “specials”, but the stuff he had is jumbled up in pieces now, and would be murder to do anything with.
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I don’t remember gluing macaroni but I do remember woodburning (pyrography) sets and kits where you would burnish copper foil over a plastic form and then brush with hydrogen sulphide (?). These were not school projects but, I think, cub scouts because I seem to remember the images being in the wolf-bear-lion milieu.
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Oh yeah! I did woodburning. And mom helped me do the copper thing. Took a project to the fair for Arts and Crafts; a large oak leaf made in copper, the mounted to a board.
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OT: I approve of what YA did in the crop art queue. I hate queue jumpers. Truck drivers in England would often do this at traffic holdups, where an empty lane would start to fill up with what were, in fact, queue jumpers. A truck would often pull into that lane and then stick to the speed of the adjacent vehicle in the lane it had just left,blocking overtakes. I did it mamy times myself, and found it very satisfying. Unless I was in a hurry myself – we all have feet of clay, as Renee pointed out recently.
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The thing about the crop art line is that it crawls so slowly. I am one to just slide in behind everyone and get in and out quickly, not examining each and every piece. Especially now with COVID, I don’t want to spend half an hour standing next to the same people. When I have a mask on but they don’t.
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I don’t recall using any foods as art materials when I was a kid. We ate our macaroni, and used crayons and fingerpaints and such for artwork. Maybe the macaroni art era was after my time. We did get to play with food coloring and powdered sugar frosting on cookies. The ultimate goal there, though, was to eat the cookies.
When I was a young adult there was a Christmas ornament trend where you made a dough out of flour and salt. I think that was my first experience of using food in that way.
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We once made strings of popcorn for the Christmas tree…
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I have often thought about putting out strings of popcorn in winter for the birds and squirrels. Stringing it sounds crafty and very Martha Stewart. In actual practice, though, when I make popcorn I mostly eat it myself, and anything left over just gets dumped into a platform feeder. Sorry, squirrels, just make do without the strings.
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