MILL CITY FARMERS MARKET

We had the great opportunity to be a vendor one Saturday at the Mill City Farmers Market which is located down in Minneapolis in the milling area which once made Minneapolis great.

 The day was not real beautiful but all of the foods and products available to consumers was wonderful.  I had attended it one Saturday a few years back and was pretty impressed by it and especially the location and the history of it and it certainly does not hurt to have the Guthrie Theater right next door to it.

We were actually located down in an area where the train cars accessed the milling area years ago.

You can see lots of the other vendors in this picture with the huge mill silos in the background.  There was a Pillsbury mill across the way that I should have gotten a picture of but forgot.  The area we were in was under that lean-to area which you can kind of see behind the blue-topped canopies.

Here my sister sits during a quiet moment before the rain started I think. 
I love the history of this mill and thinking about the farmers that grew all the wheat that came by the traincars full to this building for the making of flour and then of course the flour being shipped out to feed the world.

There is a cool museum and store there that tells the story and some of the old mill ruins are there and it makes for a great place to tour and take some neat pictures.

I think they are hoping to continue the market inside the museum area this late fall/winter.  I am sure you can get the info on the web site.  We had a real nice time there.

been there, done that also

We went to two cranberry (fests) festivals in Wisconsin for vending also.  The first one was to Warrens, Wi. It is a real nice festival and this year was their 40th anniversary I seem to recall so they had special things going on.  They always have a parade and the marching bands that come from around the area are wonderful to see and listen to.  This year I actually saw some of the cranberry bogs. 

The bogs did not seem to be flooded yet but I did not get close enough to take a good look... again pictures from the car...good grief, do we never get out of that car?

Sorry for the poor picture quality.  I did not see the two guys standing in the cranberry bog trying to sell cranberry juice...like on tv!

The next cranfest was up at Stone Lake, Wi and it was a cool windy day with a passing snow shower that came down like miniscule hail balls.  It lasted probably a minute total.  There was all kinds of beautiful landscape of colored leaves, so....out comes the camera again.  Thank goodness it survived the punctured coca-cola can in my purse that we had to deal with out at Warrens.  Ugh, everything dripping wet and thank goodness that thiry-one bag was washable and turned out good as new.  I still have to check my camera's battery charger.  Back to the lovely scenery at the blur of travel speed.

I could not get enough of the lovely scenery even though leaves had already started to disappear.

One more for those of us that love fall...

Beautiful. Funny how God has given us this wonderful season of gorgeous colors and lovely weather to boost us as we head into the darkening days of the up-coming winter season.  I like to push fall as long as I can and just keep working on things outside until the snow finally turns us inside to hibernating by the fire in the evenings with the quiet whirl of the spinning wheel.  God has blessed us so, hopefully he is blessing you also.

Been there, done that.....

I have been waiting to do some posting on my blog when I had some pictures to  put with the places we have been to shows.  I am finally ready.  Hurray!  (try not to get too excited)

My sister and I went out to Watertown, S.D. for the North Country Fiber Fair.  It was fun to see how another fiber event is held.  A much smaller venue than Shepherds' Harvest in Minnesota but a very nice event and I have not been to Dakota for a few years and although we were hardly across the border you can see the land change from flat prairies where the combines were already rolling through western Minnesota into the rolling hills of grassland.  Everything looked dry starting about an hour west of home, the corn looking like it had been frosted to death which of course it hadn't.  Probably why they were harvesting already.  This was only the third weekend in Sept. and there was not much combining go on around home yet.

I will apologize for any fuzziness of the pictures as I handed my camera to my sister as we were headed home and said "here, take some pictures".

There is just something about all this wide open prairie that I love.  We are all kind of "close" around home with our neighborhood expanding rapidly the last few years so it is nice to see all this wide open space that probably has not changed much since creation.

You hardly realize that as you head into western Minnesota you slowly start climbing in elevation and on the way back of course we were headed slowly down.

 And of course out in Watertown is the lovely building which is home to Terry Redlin's gallery.  I toured it a few years ago.  A stately building with all of his beautiful paintings inside and lot of other things.  We were able to see the building from our hotel room.

Next year I hope to spend a little more time and go and tour it once again.  So thanks Watertown and North Country Fiber Fair, we had a great time.