It was Otley Show at the weekend and the sun shone all day, it was glorious! It’s the oldest one day agricultural show in the country (212th show) and locally it’s the first one of the season. As it’s fairly early in the year it does get more than it’s fair share of wet shows, so it was nice to have a hot and sunny one.

Otley show is still a traditional agricultural show, there’s competitions for cows, sheep, horse jumping, heavy horses, chickens usually too but none this year due to bird flu. There’s even ferret racing and terrier racing! I like looking at the sheep with all their different fleeces, this is a beautiful Wensleydale sheep…

…I’m not sure what breed these rams were sheltering from the sun under a pallet, but their horns were stunning…

There’s a handicraft marquee with various classes to enter for sewing, flower arranging, painting, photography, baking, wine-making…and children’s classes too. I used to enter every year when the children were small – the few days before the show were always a bit stressful trying to get everyone’s entries ready! I hadn’t entered for a few years but this year I decided to put a few things in. In the end I entered 10 classes as it was only a £1 to enter and if you entered 10 classes you got a free ticket to get in! I entered 2 bags, 2 Christmas decorations, 2 cross-stitch, a miniature flower arrangement, 2 photos and a lemon drizzle cake. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere with the photos or the cake or the flower arranging for that matter, so how did I do…

My backpack won first prize…

… and the owl Christmas stocking won second prize…

and my big cross-stitch won first prize too.

My other three entries didn’t get anything but I’m happy with that, I enter for the fun of it. It’s always interesting seeing what everyone else entered, chuntering about the judging, it’s all part of the fun!

We love looking at all the children’s entries too, it’s hard judging children’s stuff as you have to take their age into account, I’ve done it at a village show so I know! It’s very easy for people to complain that one hand-writing or picture is better than another, but it may be by a much older child. The children’s judge also seemed to take account of which ones clearly had parental help too which was good. We did laugh when we saw the pasta collage, there were some with lots of different pasta shapes and colours, others had mums like me who refused to by any extras so they were stuck with spaghetti and fusilli 😀

We could collect our entries and winnings at 4.30pm, I packed half my entries into my back pack and put the pictures in a bag which a strong friend kindly offered to carry home…and I promptly left my backpack in the marquee!!! I realised Sunday evening that I didn’t have it and as I had no recollection of actually carrying my backpack I was pretty sure it was left in the tent, which meant the chances are it was safe. I sent a quick e-mail off to the show office and this morning I heard they did have it, so I can collect it later in the week! What am I like!!!