Happy Little Farm 2019!

WooHoo! This event is the Circus Guild's FAVORITE event of the year! Happy Little Farm owners, Casey and Shelley, host this delightful potluck they call "The Giver by the River" that includes square dancing, music, great food and drinks, kids everywhere, and circus. Here's what the circus portion of this great event looked like this year.
Acro Cats, Chipp and Sadye!

Dream Frohe on the lyra.

Former guild member Ariel.

Daniel wooing the kids with his bubbles and contact ball.

Some of the many happy kids enjoying the circus antics.

The Bunion Sisters, Sadye and Heidi.

Our wonderful hosts, Casey and Shelly (with son Willoughby).

Wren and I performing our "Turn Around" juggling act as Cupids.

Justin Credible performing his hat, cane, feather, and suitcase act.

Keelia! Performing at the Giver for the first time!

Sadye and I as the hot dogs, doing our onion juggling act.

Chipp performing his almost-annual, back by popular demand, Banana of Delight. Introduced appropriately as, "Once you've seen the banana of delight, you cannot un-see it". This year, Shelley was the brave banana lighter.

This photo captures the effect of Chipp's intro for me perfectly.

The cast, including Shelley!

We can't wait for next year!

Happy Little Farm

We love the Happy Little Farm (this is Casey and Shelly who have this sweet annual event, aka The Giver by the River)!

 This was our 5th-ish year (I say 'ish' because I missed performing in 2014 because of my torn calf muscle) performing for this sweet family-farm celebration.
The lineup went like this:
Chipps - Intro
Esther - Slackline
Della n Wren - Hat

Heidi - Aerial
Chipps n Sadye - Acro
Wren - One Trick Pony
Justin - Mime/Sword
Dream - Aerial
Della n Sadye - Tap

Chipps - Lasso
Strangely - Song
PJ - Aerial
Della - Pig

It was a wonderful show as usual, and many said the best so far! Go circus!

Anacortes Brewery and Happy Little Farm Show

 We had a double-header today! Chipp, Wren, and I performed for the Anacortes Brewery Anniversary Party (it turned 21). I performed the moustache song, the chair dance, and Wren and I did our juggling and rope acts. Chipp MC'd and did his banana song hat act. It all seemed to go over well. We ate some of their roasted pig, and away we went, onto our evening adventure/slew of more performances.

We love the Happy Little Farm Party aka The Giver By The River. We've been part of this quaint event for about 5 years now. Many people were unavailable to be part of the show this year, but we made it happen with a perfectly quaint little cast (minus Chelsea even, who at the last minute had to not perform because she ruptured an ovarie! Rebecca was there and helped assess and Chelsea was better after a couple hours).

We spent the night again this year in Vince, and woke up to vegetarian biscuits and gravy, pancakes, and fresh fruit. A full day of shows ending on a full morning stomach. I feel like a pretty lucky gal.

Happy Little Farm Show 2014

Everyone loves the Happy Little Farm party (aka The Giver by the River).

The circus has performed there the last 3 years, making this the 4th annual circus show at the event. The majority of the crew this year came from the group that performed at the Anacortes Arts Festival earlier today. Here we are setting up the rig again.

And preparing for our third show of the day!

Wren MC'd all three shows! Go Wren!

Chipps started out the show with a bang... and our dear host Casey was there to light the eternal flame...

Banana style... and with a little acro support from Greg.

Yup. That's a banana between his butt cheeks.

Justincredible performed his Hat and Cane bit with Mattea accompanying him on ukulele.

Laura performed, complete with hands-free splits!

 Vern and Fallon performed their adorable ball juggling routine.

 The show was a great success!

The next morning we had the infamous vegetarian biscuits and gravy for breakfast! Thanks Shelly (host) and mom, and so many more (like Mr. Bunz Willoughby)!

 Our host, Casey, in the spotlight of the children.

And Wren. The producer of the show and short-shorts-high-boxers-wearin', hands-in-pants, shady-man of the morning, doling out payments to performers... or is he stashing seconds of biscuits and gravy?

 Whatever's happening here, we're all so lucky to have him. What a delightful weekend.

Summer Sewing

So I'm moving into a Clown Pod at the Quarry! I'm super stoked because of many reasons. One of those reasons is sewing... I guess I love it.  And though living in a van has been an amazing and liberating adventure, it is not the most conducive for sewing machine desires. Ok, I will share more info about the quarry and my new residency soon, but for now... here are photos of my first project in the  Pod... Chaps!

First I cut up a pair of old torn Carharts (thanks Liam!) for a pattern. I had the darndest time trying to see how to make chaps online, so decided just cuttin' up a some pants would be the best idea.

Then picked the fabric from one of my (too) many fabric bins, cut out enough for two pair, drew a fun design for the sides (the black fabric), and decided on elastic for the back. This is just the preliminary phase... soon I will fringe, trim and bedazzle the heck out of these!

Here is a photo of them in action... Wren and I have a rope act we've been working on. He found this super awesome song (Egyptian Regge by Johnathan Richman & Modern Lovers) that had us thinking cowboys, so that was the motivation for this project, and we had an amazing place to perform... on a flatbed truck at the annual summer potluck at the Happy Little Farm in Conway (awesome folks, food and best vegetarian gravy in the morning!).

Here we are as Yippee and Ki-yay (with the just-sewn chaps, vests and buckles), two of the Happy Little Circus crew (Justincredible, Miles, Zach, Tasche, Kai, Clay, Jules, Chipps and Jasper)...

and we were just part of the ongoing entertainment of the day/night, as Lucas called some square-dancing, there was a paper-rock-scissors tournament, Smoke Wagon played some rockin set into the night, and there was midnight naked slip-and-sliding! What!?! Hooray for summertime, circus and sewing!