Do you see that blue ribbon?  That is attached to a pumpkin at the Cumberland Fair that weighs 1,169 pounds....and it is still not the world's largest pumpkin!  I volunteered to spin at the Cumberland Fair for my spinning group, the R&R Spinners, and this pumpkin patch was collected around the front door of the Exhibition Hall snoozing away on their pumpkin mattresses.  This nice woman and I agreed that we were dumbfounded both at the pumpkins that we were seeing, and the fact that their are evidently other, much bigger pumpkins somewhere else.  Evidently 2000 pounds is the 4 minute mile of pumpkin land, and it has yet to be reached, but someone, somewhere is pushing the envelope at just under 2,000 pounds.  Imagine something more than 1/3 bigger that the one I am standing next to.  You could solve the housing crises with enough of those, and maybe feed the country a lot of pumpkin pie with the also rans.

And this is me actually spinning inside the exhibition hall.  I am guessing that Joe, the in-house photographer, has just said something hysterically funny.  The shawl I am wearing here, which you can't see very well, is my first entirely handspun yarn and is an Elizabeth Zimmerman Pi R Square from Knitting Around.  I recommend this one to the shawl knitters amongst you since the construction tends to throw the weight to the front, where you want it, and it stays on your shoulders beautifully with no tugging and wrestling.  It is the perfect shawl for spinning.