Musical Monday - Labor Day Bluegrass Extravaganza!

Or something along those lines just to get me caught up.  It was another one of "those" weekends with lots of activities including spending a lovely evening with the neighbors next door and their twins (who will turn five on Friday).  Memorable quote of the evening from Vivyan (after being scolded for wiping her nose on her mother's napkin):  "Moooooommmm...God has mmaaaaaaannnnnyyyyy napkins!"

But, since it's Musical Monday, I'll start out by recapping last weekend's musical mayhem with my husband and his band, Death By Barbecue Banjo.  They had gigs every day of the Labor Day weekend - and each one involved barbecue!  I'm not a fan of barbecue, but I managed.

I didn't go to Saturday's gig - needed a little downtime.  However, Sunday's gig, Bluegrass, Barbecue and Boom, was a smashing (dare I say "booming"?) success.  It was held at Dawe's Arboretum, which is one of those amazing places you need to visit if you ever come to Ohio.  I was fortunate to grow up less than ten miles from Dawe's and visited often, however, it had been over thirty years since I'd been there.

Though I didn't get to see a lot of the arboretum, I could tell it was at least as lovely as I remembered, if not moreso.  I got to relive many favorite childhood memories such as the summer I was six, when my mother took broom handles, nylon netting and wire coat hangers and made butterfly nets for me and all of my friends.  She'd fill the car with kids and drive us out to Dawe's where we'd spend the day catching butterflies - butterflies we had to be very careful not to kill or injure as we only caught them to look at them up close and identify them, then we let them go. 

DBB was one of three bluegrass bands to perform.  The Newark-Granville Symphony (a very impressive group of musicians!) were the headliners.  I wish I'd been able to get some pictures of them, but I filled up the memory card on my camera trying to get a good video of DBB.  Here are a few pics (but no video...):

The crowd starts filling in early.

 My sweetie getting tuned up

and posing for a glamour shot.

Last-minute rehearsal

Lots of eager bluegrass fans waiting for the show to start.

And they weren't disappointed!!!

The next day, we went to The Hill's Market for their annual event, The Ohio Hog Roast.  Yes, we had barbecue.  Very good barbecue...barbecue that even I wanted second helpings of!  We had a big, enthusiastic crowd for this show, too, including the world's youngest DBB fan (and banjo player's granddaughter).

We are enjoying beautiful, cool, sunny early autumn days here in central Ohio, and I've had plenty of opportunities to bring out my Brandywine Shawl.  On Sunday, at Dawe's, I was walking through the crowd, looking for a good spot to take pictures when a heard a woman's voice yell something I couldn't quite make out.  A few steps later, I realized it sounded like she said, "Brandywine", so I stopped and turned around and saw this:

Is this cool or what?  She had just finished and blocked her Brandywine which was knit with Sterling and Silver which has amazing little silver bits all through it.  She also showed me the Merope Shawl she had just started in the same yarn, and it was equally beautiful.  How amazing is this?  I'm at a bluegrass festival and meet a fellow knitter with the same shawl I'm wearing!  It made my day, no, it made my whole weekend, plain and simple.