Margaret M. Doyle was tending her Espresso-A-Go-Go tent at the National Folk Festival when something like a whirlwind came dancing across the ground toward her.

"I thought it was locusts - some kind of weird Sunday thing," Doyle said.

It was a dust devil, a tube of swirling, rising air full of dirt and trash. It caused foam cups to rise like helium balloons, and plastic bags shot hundreds of feet into the air.

The devil formed about 1 p.m. by a sausage-cooking tent near the Ukrop's stage and headed for Doyle's tent in a line of vendors about 60 yards away.

"It was cool," said Jovi Nguyen, 10, of Chesterfield County. "It was like a little tornado."

Hundreds of people stopped eating and chatting to watch, cry out to friends and point to the rising trash.

Doyle's red, pagoda-shaped tent, about 15 feet wide and 10 feet tall, was anchored by a 20-pound weight at each corner pole.

The wind lifted the tent about 2 feet off the ground. Worker Richard Double jumped up and grabbed a cross pole to keep it from blowing away.

The dust devil rose at least as high as the nearby Federal Reserve Bank building, which is nearly 400 feet tall.

Hot, rising air and dry weather, like the current drought, help make dust devils. The dryness contributes the dust, which makes the phenomenon more visible, said Bill Sammler, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

In the Virginia Folklife Area, Sandra Bennett sat at her spinning wheel, rhythmically pressing her bare foot on the pedal as multicolored yarn whirled onto a spool.

"What's your favorite color?" she asked children who stood mesmerized by the process.

If the answer was green, she snatched green yarn from the basket at her feet and started spinning.

"I go all over the world teaching people how to do this," said Bennett, of Tazewell County, a master artist in fiber arts with the Virginia Folklife Apprentice Program.

Ganell Marshall has been making corn shuck dolls since 1960, when she was a young mother who was looking for something interesting to do.

"You can only dust so much," said Marshall, who lives in Wise County, in the far southwest mountains of Virginia.

The art of making the dolls came from American Indians, she said. They passed it down to pioneers, who brought everything they owned - toys seldom included - on their backs and in their wagons.

Doll-making became her passion and her job. She figures she's made at least 20,000 of the dolls over the years. She can make one in 15 minutes if her assembly line is set up and she's really rolling. She also makes a tidy profit. The more elaborate ones are priced at $35 and up.

"I think it needs to be handed down to the next generation so they can appreciate what the other generations did coming up," said Marshall. She's teaching her niece, Sarah Mullins, 20, how to make the dolls.

At first glance, they looked like gorgeous carpets made of the most colorful fibers. Then you noticed the guy watering them. Turns out, the "carpets" were patterns of dyed sawdust and white rice.

Using a form of traditional Guatemalan street art, Ubaldo Sanchez and four other artists created the display - one was the Folk Festival logo, the other a series of Guatemalan images including a Mayan temple and a dancer - on the slate walkway next to the old water-wheel at the Tredegar Iron Works.

The displays took less than 8 hours apiece to complete and required the use of stencils, not to mention great diligence on the part of the artists.

"An artist is patient," said Sanchez, 23, with a smile. He lives in Arlington, having come to the United States in 1998.

Frances Davis was a blur of motion, smoothing dough with a rolling pin and filling it with cooked apples, then pressing tight the edges before dropping it gently into boiling oil. All of that and she served samples. The line was long of festival-goers wanting a taste of her fried apple pies.

The oldest girl in a big sharecropping family from Pittsylvania County, Davis started cooking with her mother when she was 10. By the time she turned 12, she was running the kitchen: waking at 4 a.m. to fire up the cooking stove, preparing three meals a day for the entire family and watching the younger children so her mother could work in the tobacco fields with her father.

She also went to school and earned a college degree. She worked as a social worker and a special education teacher.

"Never thought anything about it," said Davis, 57, of the work load. "I just did it."

A lot of folks gathered around Jack and Nannie Branch, experts in curing hams. So, what were the Branches, of Bristol, telling everyone?

"That I can't sell'em," Jack Branch said with a smile. He was there to pass along his knowledge of the process. He could talk about how much salt and sugar and red pepper to use and how long it takes to hang them to cure - about eight months - and about how good they are. "We cut into our first one this year in August, and it was delicious," he said.

But he couldn't actually sell the hams he had on display. He didn't have the license for it.

Otherwise, he said, "I could've sold 50 of them."