the fair family

For the Burton family of Oak Cliff, the Fair’s Creative Arts competition is a family thing.

Mary Jane Burton enters quilts. Her husband, Alex, was a wood turner and used to enter handmade wooden bowls. Their adult daughter, Mila Burton, who also lives in Oak Cliff, enters needlework.

Mila first entered two years ago after giving her mom a 5-by5-inch cross-stitched butterfly. Mary Jane liked it so much that she entered it in the fair along with her quilts. The butterfly won fourth-place. All three Burtons won ribbons that year.

Mary Jane’s interest in Fair competitions started with quilting. It’s a hobby she always wanted to take up, and she started learning about 10 years ago, when she finally had time.

“It’s a journey,” she says. “The more you do, the more you realize you need to learn more because there are so many different ways of quilting, so many styles.”

This year, she’s entering a 72-by-79-inch quilt in a pattern called French braid. She thinks it’s quite good, if she does say so herself.

“You never know who you’re coming up against, though,” she says.

Mary Jane also is entering a doll-bed quilt in a difficult pattern called grandmother’s English garden.

She won a blue ribbon for the baby quilt she entered last year, and she also has won red and white, second and third, respectively, for other projects.

Mila’s entry this year is a 3-foot-by-1.5-foot needlepoint of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was another gift to Mary Jane, who collects Madonnas.

For many years, Alex Burton, who died in September at 80, had an office in Exposition Park, and he was a judge several times in the chili cook-off. So they are Fair regulars.

One of Mila’s best State Fair memories took place not at the actual Fair but at the Bar of Soap, the bygone punk-rock dive bar/ washateria in Expo Park.

“I had gone to the Fair with some friends, and it was raining,” she says. “So we went to Bar of Soap and dried our clothes, listened to music and drank beer. It was great. I miss that place.”