County Fair Themed Centerpieces

I recently had the opportunity to create a bunch of country fair themed centerpieces which were a fun way to incorporate a lot of the cute elements that you’d find at an old-fashioned country fair into decorations. The centerpieces were for this year’s Girls Scouts Leadership Luncheon in Spokane and when I heard they needed centerpieces, I offered to donate them. Because I was participating in the event as the Keynote Speaker, I thought it’d be fun to combine The Farm Chicks Fair theme for this year, which is “County Fair”, with the Girl Scouts motto of Girls with Courage, Confidence, and Character. I made special prize ribbons, representing the grand prize winners at the fair for things like best pickles, finest quilt, or grand champion steer, but with a Girl Scouts theme:

For me, the county fair is a celebration of agriculture and the American family farm and I wanted to bring in a few little pieces that really say county fair to me. I made cotton candy out of cotton to represent the midway:

I covered old tin cans with cheery fabric and my friend, Shawn, who owns The Flower Bar, made humble farm-like bouquets for each one, to represent the farm wife and all she does to make her home a cheery place:

Pastry and More Bakery made the CUTEST tiny little loaves of bread, representing the many baking contests at the fair:

They needed to stay cute, but still stay edible, so Shawn and I wrapped each one in cellophane and placed them into little lunch sacks:

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To pull it all together, we lined bushel baskets with cheery yellow gingham and filled each one with the cotton candy, farmhouse arrangement, bread loaf, apples to represent agriculture, and adorned each one with the prize ribbon:

Most of all, I wanted to make something special out of not much at all, just like the farmers and their families of our country do with their plots of land.

Notes:

I learned to make prize ribbons from the talented Cathe Holden. She wrote a whole book about it. You can find it here. You can find Cathe on Facebook here and Instagram here.

I found the ribbon for the project many years ago at a fabric rummage sale. It had originally been fabric that the lady had cut strips from, sewing the lengths together to create hundreds of yards of handmade ribbon. I just know she’d be so happy to learn that hundreds of people admired her ribbon on those centerpieces!

The darling little bread loaves were made by Pastry and More in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and now I want to special order the tiny loaves for everything. They smelled like heaven. You can follow Pastry and More on Facebook here and Instagram here.

The little farmhouse arrangements were made by Shawn at The Flower Bar in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and each centerpiece was arranged in her beautiful little shop. Thank you, Shawn for your generosity! You can follow Shawn on Instagram here and Facebook here.

At the end of the luncheon, a winner from each table got to take home a centerpiece.