Please post!

If you are enjoying this blog, please consider posting below some of your favorite outfits. I have no idea if anyone is looking at this unless I see your comments! And it makes it more fun if there are comments by others, I think.

Some ideas for comments:

• Post what YOU wore to Common Ground this year.
• Post the favorite outfit you saw.
• Post under pictures of people you know.
• Post under the pictures of outfits you love.

Etcetera!

Thanks. You don't know how happy it makes me to read your thoughts.

Farewell, 2011!

I'm going to end this year album with the first shot I took on the last day of the 2011 fair. I saw this woman in the parking lot (read: grass field) just as we were getting out of our car and heading toward the fair. Beautiful! She told me she's been dressing like this for a long time, and is known as the flower lady--and that she's a nurse for HeadStart when she's not growing flowers on her farm, Heartfelt Farm in Cushing. That's a true rural Maine lifestyle.

So she's got the wacky flower-trimmed hat, the classy red cardigan over the green tank, the swingy full paisley skirt, and the rockin' red cowgirl boots. And she looks divine. I also later saw her take off her hat and she has the most lovely silver hair down her back. I want to be her when I grow up.

Her partner, with his wide straw farmer's hat and leggings, looks pretty great, too.

But sadly....this is my last photo from this year. I hope to have more next year, but in the meantime, if any of you have photos of great Common Ground Fair style, please let me know.

And I'll start counting the days till next year's fair.

Hey you!

My husband was appalled that I yelled, "Hey, you!" to this cute woman from the back of our tractor-pulled shuttle wagon on the way into the fair. But she was standing in line and I didn't know how else to get her attention when she briefly looked my way. "'Excuse me' could have worked," my husband reminded me. He's very polite, that one.

But I'm glad I caught this teenager, who is reviving some of the looks from my own teen years in the 90s...the hippie-ish ombre baby doll dress with the plaid shirt unbuttoned over it...and are those actual combat boots? Ah, I miss my combat boots.

Is there anything else to do besides look at people's cool get-ups?

Why, yes! Contrary to appearances, the Common Ground Country Fair is not in fact one big street style fashion show set amidst hay bales and old barns. Most people, I imagine, don't even associate the words "style" or "fashion" with the Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association. Here are twenty of some of the hundreds of other things people do at the Common Ground Fair:

1. Attend workshops on topics like chainsaw technique, making your own herbal tinctures, farming with draft horses and shamanism.
2. Sign political petitions for a variety of causes, from bringing the soldiers home to supporting civil unions.
3. Listen to nationally-renowned environmental speakers like Barbara Damrosch talking about why organic small farms are not a passing trend.
4. See the famous Wednesday spinners sit and spin wool.
5. Visit the rare and beautiful bunnies, chickens, lambs and other animals.
6. Buy world-class silver jewelry, hand-carved wooden spoons, tie-dye t-shirts, Amish-made furniture and other crafts in the Crafts area.
7. Ride in a covered wagon around the fairgrounds.
   
8. Indulge fried dough, french fries, and ice cream--county fair staples--with a difference: all the food at the Common Ground Fair is locally made and at least somewhat healthy: the fries are organic potatoes, the dough is whole wheat and wood-fired, and the ice cream is sweetened with Maine maple syrup.
   
9. Enjoy the popular sheepdog demonstrations.
10. Nurse your baby in the nursing tent, covered with cheery quilts and equipped with cozy chairs and board books.
11. Volunteer to work on the composting toilets, recycling bins, common kitchen, parking, or any of many other areas--volunteers get free admission, the opportunity to pitch their tent, and a free wholesome meal in that common kitchen.
12. Bring in the apples off the old apple tree in your yard and get them identified by John Bunker, heirloom apple expert.
    
13. Browse cloth diaper covers, homemade organic catnip pillows, wooden toys, Christmas stockings, goat's milk soaps, wool blankets and much more in the Maine Marketplace.
14. Walk to the entrance gate from the parking lot via a beautiful wooded trail.
    
15. Eat pretty unusual fair food--vegan Thai tofu curry, free-range steak burgers or raw milk, anyone?
16. Listen to fantastic local music, from Acadian fiddle tunes to contemporary rock and everything in between, at one of several stages.
    
17. Bring local organic veggies, plus your Halloween pumpkin, home from the extensive farmer's markets.
    
18. Peruse freshly shorn wool and other fibers from area livestock.
19. Enter your prize-worthy kale, apple pie or watercolor painting in the annual contest.
    
20. Watch the fair's signature event, the Vegetable Parade: teens on stilts and teens with bagpipes leading a just-assembled hodgepodge of kids in gorgeous handmade peapod, sunflower and ladybug costumes, carrying signs like "No Spray!" and "Don't Panic, I'm Organic" and beating pot and pan drums. If nothing else gives you hope, the Vegetable Parade will.

Modern world

This is my friend Bethany, striking a goofy pose. She's a modern dancer and a mama and an all-around good person. And everything she wears looks kind of like this--she cuts, alters and otherwise messes around with netural-colored basics until they become anything but basic. And she always looks totally comfy and ready to get up and move.

I really love it when a person find their look, their very own look that looks exactly right for them and not exactly like anyone else, and stick with it. A kind of anti-uniform uniform. I aspire to this myself. Especially for those of us with young kids, it's really nice to be able to go to your closet in the morning and throw on the first thing you see and know that you'll feel stylish and like yourself for the rest of the day.

The outfits that started it all...

The Common Ground Fair has been inspiring me ever since I first came to it in 2001. So much about it is inspiring--I'll write more about that in another post--but the style is an added bonus for me. I love seeing people dress up in their wildest country finery!

At that very first fair I attended, I was walking behind a woman with dreadlocks down to the ground, carrying a baby in a beautiful sling. She might have been one of the first women I ever saw carrying her baby in this way, and although I wasn't a mother yet, it was so encouraging to me, because I thought, Wow, you can be a mom and still look super cool.

The last time I attended the fair, in 2009, I saw a woman wearing a red gingham shirt and a denim overalls jumper dress and boots. It sounds kind of boring and traditional, but it was actually incredibly chic and flattering, and looked somehow contemporary and fashionable even as it played on completely vernacular Maine farm wear. And I saw it once, two years ago, and I haven't forgotten it since, and I think about that woman in that outfit ALL the time. I've looked for an overalls dress just like she had; I've thought about finding a red gingham shirt even though, honestly, it would not look good on me. It was a highly influential style moment, more influential than anything I've seen in a magazine or shop during the same time.

This is what made me want to do this blog, so I could keep looking back at the style that inspires me most--things worn by real people in the real countryside--throughout the year, whenever I choose. I hope it will be inspiring for some of you as well.

(And maybe some of who have never come to the Common Ground Country Fair will come. And those of you who, like me, try never to miss it, will enjoy this funny angle on one of the best festivals on earth.)

Me

I didn't get pictures of my outfits the first two days. You will have to take my word for it that they were pretty good. I was especially pleased with Day #1's outfit, which mixed a chartreuse green top with a black dress, a petticoat (because you know I love that petticoat look, and have since I was 8 years old and first reading Laura Ingalls Wilder), and red and white patterned knee socks.

But here is me on Day #3. Borrowing my husband's Minnetonka hat, thrift store pointelle sweater over thrift store blue shirt with lace collar and consignment shop organic cotton skirt with big pockets. And cowboy boots I bought 5 years ago in a real cowboy shop in Austin, Texas.

And I am standing in front of an actual barn, actually waiting for the actual antique tractor that pulls the actual wagons as a shuttle from the parking lot to the entrance of the actual MOFGA Common Ground Country Fair.