Brooks: Some thread, some beads and some joy at State Fair after a bleak week

If you’re lucky enough to get one last day at the Minnesota State Fair on Monday, take one final look around.

Midway between the giant pumpkins and the line for Amish doughnuts sits the Creative Activities Building and all the wonders within. Quilts, baked goods, metalwork, leatherwork, woodwork, weaving, knitting, needlework, stained glass, clothing, canning, cross-stitch.

Some of the best go home with blue ribbons. Most years, at least a few of those blue ribbons go home with Terry Steen.

“My mother taught me to crochet when I was probably about junior high-age,” said Steen, a retired teacher and computer analyst, now 79. “My sisters had to learn how to change tires and change oil. So I had to learn to cook and do something else. So it was crochet, because my mother crocheted a lot.”

He took a ball of yarn and a crochet hook to graduate school and found “it was a nice relief to sit and crochet for a while.” As newlyweds, he and his wife crocheted an afghan together. He crocheted christening dresses for their daughters, and when his daughter got married, he crocheted a beaded purse so lovely, she carried it down the aisle instead of a bouquet.

One day, Steen’s daughter encouraged him to enter his work at the Minnesota State Fair.

“So I made a stinking little four-inch bag with a rose on it and I thought, ‘OK, we can take this to the fair,’” Steen said. “I not only won a blue ribbon for it, I won a sweepstakes award for crocheted articles, which shocked the hell out of me, and the rest of the family too, I think.”

Even if you’ve roamed the Creative Activities building and marveled at the displays, it’s hard to grasp the sheer scope of the talent and hard work on display. The results of the handcraft competition alone runs for 28 pages. Needlework runs 30 pages. It takes 15 pages just to summarize the best of the baked goods.

“I have become a real fan of the Creative Activities building,” Steen said. “When you go in there, you just see so many marvelous things that people have done. I just marvel at how people can be so creative.”

Sometimes people ask Steen if he sells his work. He’s tried, but if he charged 5 cents per bead or minimum wage for each hour he spent crocheting 20,000 beads into place, it would push each piece into designer handbag territory.

So he gives his creations away to family and friends. Nobody goes into the Creative Activities Building for money or fame.

“You can’t be doing it because you love the money and the ribbons,” he said. “You’ve got to do it because you love it and you enjoy sharing it.”

“It’s genuinely relaxing to sit there and do something,” said Steen, who crochets while he’s watching television or visiting with other crafters during his neighborhood’s monthly stitch-and-chat. “After you’ve crocheted for a few hours, you’ve finished a few rows and you can say, ‘My, I accomplished something.’”