State Fair News

State Fair of Texas issues 2025 guide for arts & crafts blue ribbons

State Fair of Texas blue ribbons

SFOT

The time has come for crafty Texans to showcase their creativity: The State Fair of Texas has issued the 2025 version of its Arts & Crafts and Cooking Contest Guides, now available for download at BigTex.com/CreativeArts.

The State Fair’s Creative Arts team holds two kinds of contests: pre-Fair arts and crafts contests like quilting and jam-making; and Fair-time cooking contests, like best bread and best dish with cheese. There are more than 1,100 arts and crafts categories and 26 cooking contests.

Pre-fair contests
The 2025 Arts & Crafts Contests include Fine Art; Ceramics; Designer Craftsman; Dolls; Canning; Hobby Collections; Holiday Corner; Needlepoint, Crewel, and Counted Cross-Stitch; Needlework and Sewing; Afghans, Rugs, Quilts, and Bedspreads; Photography; Scale Models; Glue-a-Shoe; and The Great Pumpkin Challenge.

Actual registration for the 2025 pre-Fair contests will open online on May 7 with a deadline of Monday, July 28, to submit online entry forms and fees.

Contestants can submit their entries via mail by July 28 or hand-deliver items to the Creative Arts building in Fair Park on August 1, 2, and 3 from 9 am-5 pm.

In the weeks following, entries will be judged, and contestants will be notified once the results are finalized. Entries awarded a ribbon will be displayed during the 2025 State Fair of Texas.

Cooking Contests
The 2025 Cooking Contests include Bread; Cooking With Cheese; Honey, the Magic Ingredient; Beekeepers Honey, Farm to Fork; Chocolate; Pizza Cook-Off; Youth Cooking Contest; Best of Show-Down (invitation only); Play with your Food; Dough-Re-Me Pastry; Soup or Salad; Ice Cream Freeze-Off; The Ultimate Grilled Cheese Challenge; Charcuterie Board; Texas Chuck Wagon; International Cuisine; Speedy Dishes; Fair Concoctions; Chicken or the Egg; Cobbler Cook-Off; Tex Mex; and Candy.

The 2025 State Fair of Texas Cooking Contest Guide and the Cooking Contest Calendar are now available, with online registration opening on May 7, and closing Monday, July 28.

Blue Ribbon Battle
The State Fair of Texas is bringing back the Battle for the Blue Ribbons – a spring cooking competition consisting of three of the Fair’s most popular Creative Arts Cooking Contests: Cookies, Cakes, and Pies, running from May 16-May 18.

Amateur home cooks of all ages may enter for the chance to be awarded first, second, third, and honorable mention for a total of 40 blue-ribbon winners who will be invited to compete in their respective contests at the exclusive Best of Show-Down in the Competition Kitchen during the 2025 State Fair of Texas on October 5, 2025.

One contestant from each of the three contests will be awarded a Best of Show ribbon, allowing them to advance to a head-to-head battle for the Best of Show-Down grand prize. For more information about this specific competition and to register, visit BigTex.com/Battle.

Registration
Participants are encouraged use the online registration system for all contests. It allows the creation of a family account, which permits adults in the household to add additional contestants to the account and register youth contestants. Youth contestants will have their own designated entries for Creative Arts competitions, but all communications regarding those entries are sent to the primary adult on the account.

Although there are paper registration forms in the Arts & Crafts and Cooking Contest Guides that can be mailed to the Fair, it is recommended to use the online registration portal to ensure contestants receive helpful reminders and judging results of their respective contests.

The 2025 State Fair of Texas will opening on Friday, September 26, and run through Sunday, October 19.

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Movie Review

New film I Want Your Sex somehow makes kinky activity boring

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex.

Writer/director Gregg Araki has been making provocative movies for nearly 40 years, releasing his debut - Three Bewildered People in the Night - in 1987. Most of them have had plotlines that revolved around sex in one way or another, and for his latest - his first film in 12 years - he’s putting it right there in the title, I Want Your Sex.

Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is an aimless twenty-something who can’t even afford the rent for his apartment with best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). Thankfully, he finds a job at the gallery of artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who is open with her sexuality both in her artwork and in her day-to-day life. That soon includes Elliot, whom she convinces to enter into a dominant-submissive relationship with her, with sessions taking place both at work and her home.

Elliot, who’s in a going-nowhere coupling with Minerva (Charli XCX), is more than willing to participate, both because it lets him feel something he doesn’t get normally and because Erika offers a perspective on sex that’s much different from people of his generation. But as he gets in deeper with her, he starts to lose a sense of himself, going down a path in which he finds himself talking to police detectives Zem (Johnny Knoxville) and Zola (Margaret Cho).

Araki does his level best to make I Want Your Sex into a broad comedy, and early on it seems as if he might succeed. The deadpan way that sexual objects appear in the film (a penis-shaped rug in Elliot and Apple’s apartment, a vagina artwork with chewed gum as the medium) make for amusing sight gags. He also makes Elliot the bewildered other in multiple twosomes, with Minerva being the funniest, as she’s way more interested in studying than his ham-fisted attempts at sex.

It’s clear that Araki wants the film to be a commentary on the generational differences about sex, but he fumbles his own idea. It starts with an on-the-nose conversation between Erika and Elliot, and continues with the various dalliances, which seem to be more about making Elliot look and feel ridiculous than giving true insight. Their encounters certainly open his mind about what sex can be, but their one-note nature makes them repetitive and frankly boring, odd considering the acts in which the two engage.

The uninspired storytelling makes the 90-minute film drag way more than it should. Araki includes a few other characters to try to vary the tone of the film, including gallery workers Zap (Mason Gooding) and Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), but their early promise yields little results. The framing device of Elliot’s interview with the detectives never works, especially because Araki completely neuters the personalities of Cho and Knoxville for seemingly no good reason.

The cast as a whole goes to waste. Hoffman is showing the promise of his late father (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and even though he’s appealing here, the material pulls him down. Wilde just made her own provocative movie about sex (The Invite), and this one pales in comparison despite her heightened performance. Wonders, Charli XCX, and Gooding are all young stars who deserve to be showcased much better than they are in this film.

A film called I Want Your Sex is announcing itself as daring and alluring, but this film contains almost none of those qualities. Instead, it’s a slog that only occasionally has something interesting to show or say, mostly relying on the power of its actors to hold viewers’ attention - and failing at even that.

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I Want Your Sex is now playing in select theaters.

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Movie Review

New film I Want Your Sex somehow makes kinky activity boring