Living Green Loot

We went to the Living Green Expo at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds today and had a great time, as usual. Dan and I have gone to Living Green every year since we met and have always considered it "our" thing to do. We both love that it's grown so large over the past few years and that more and more people and vendors are attending, but we still miss the intimate early days when it was jammed in the Education Building way off in the corner. Memories and progress...love them both!

We don't go to Living Green just to buy things, but today was definitely a day for some good loot. I love Bryn Mawr Soap and buy it a lot from the Co-op, but I always buy at least one bar in person at Living Green since the owner of the cottage industry is the one doing the selling. Bryn Mawr is not even 15 minutes from my house, so it's not like it's exotic or anything. I just love to support this local artisan. (And she always has the cutest little samples, Jackson loved picking one while I picked about five...)

Dan was super excited to stumble on the very same snackTAXI that Oprah recently endorsed (who knew?) for our lunches and snacks and we both had a ton of fun choosing which fabrics to buy. We bought two large snack taxis for sandwiches and three small ones for the kids' snacks. They're fully lined with nylon inside and can be machine-washed, thrown in the dishwasher or hand-washed. Good-bye, plastic baggies! (We bought them from the Linden Hills Natural Home Store booth.)
I've been wanting to try these dryer balls for much too long now and when I saw them on display with a "special show price" I just went for it. I used to be a dryer sheet girl a long time ago but stopped buying them when I stopped buying just about every other disposable thing in my house. I couldn't stand the waste. But then the salesguy went on to tell me about all of the chemicals in those dryer sheets and how they just don't know how much of it gets absorbed by our skin when we wear our clothes... Too much to think about. Just give me the dryer balls to fluff my clothes, control static, and shorten the drying time by evenly distributing the air and I'm set.

Oh yeah. And then there was this.
I bought yarn. It wasn't travel yarn. Totally not allowed by the terms of my yarn diet. But the tag read:

"At Meadow Oaks Farm we pamper our sheep with
natural feeds, freedom to roam, and no hormones or antibiotics."

How could I resist? (It's just a nice, soft, basic, local wool that I can totally see being made into a cabled hat this fall/winter. Every stash needs a basic cabled hat yarn on hand, right?)

If you didn't get to Living Green today, there's still time tomorrow. We thoroughly enjoyed touring the hybrid bus (well, Jackson did...we aren't all that jazzed by buses anymore), checking out the windmills, eating yummy food, putting our faces in silly cut-outs and running into people we knew. We love Living Green. In more ways than one!