Fall Into Fall Quilt Bloggers Giveaway

**Congratulations to Hilachas for winning this giveaway!**

 Many thanks to all who participated!

Welcome to the Fall Into Fall Quilt Bloggers Giveaway and blog hop! There are 143 Quilt Blogs participating in this giveaway extravaganza, and I'm so glad you decided to pay me a visit.  I'm *so* excited about my giveaway prize.  It's a fun and very useful Quick Quilts Gypsy Quilt Kit that you can turn into a colorful lap quilt!  It's valued at $39.99 and it's filled with cheery fabrics.  The kit comes with 13 assorted 18" x 21" fat quarters, one 1/2 yard piece for binding, and full-color step-by-step instructions and binding diagrams.  Scroll down for a closer look at what's going to appear on your doorstep if you win. 

(This giveaway is now closed)

***How To Enter*** 

* Leave a comment on my blog telling me your favorite fall color. 

(Please make sure to also leave a way for me to reach you if you win)

* If you'd like one more chance at winning, you can also sign up to follow my blog.  Please leave a separate comment to let me know that you follow, and that will be your second entry.  

(This is completely optional)

This giveaway is open to anyone able to receive mail. : )  Entries will close at midnight pacific time on October 14th, 2010. I will use a random number generator to pick the winner and will post my results on October 15th.  Good luck and thanks for participating!  

Giveaway Starts Tomorrow

The "Fall Into Fall Quilters Blog Giveaway" starts tomorrow! Be sure to come back and visit my blog so you can enter to win!  You definitely won't want to miss it.  I'm including a preview picture for a little clue as to what I'm giving away. Can you resist these fun, bright colors? I can't. : )

Sneak Peek

I've been doing some sewing this week on the orange and pink special order quilt that I'm making, and I thought I'd give you a sneak peek of how it's coming together so far.  I'm pretty happy with the cheery color combo. :)

Orange and Pink Quilt

Don't these fabrics look good enough to eat? I'm working on a special order quilt for a friend's little girl and she requested oranges and pinks and I am just in love with these fabrics. I can hardly bear to cut them, but I need to get started. :) I'm so excited to see how it turns out!

Fun with doll quilts

It's so fun to make mini quilts!  My mom and I like to make placemats and doll quilts because it gives us a chance to play with the fabrics on a smaller scale and try new methods of quilting and new designs without being committed to making a large quilt.   If you feel like you don't have time to quilt, I encourage you to try a small project like this.  It's a win-win situation because you get a little bit of fun, crafty, quilting time and you can finish your project in just a couple of short sewing sessions.  Plus you can make fun gifts for your kids or fun decor for your table!

 You can find this doll quilt in my etsy store.

Canning Fresh Salsa

In recent years, my family has made a habit of going to our local farm for their tomato weekend and picking fresh roma tomatoes so that we can make delicious canned salsa. The picking is fun for the first 5 minutes and then we remember what back-breaking work it is to pick anything while hunched over in a field. So we start picking faster in hopes that our giant pails will fill up quickly. 

There's nothing like the taste of a freshly picked tomato to make you realize how delicious tomatoes are supposed to be. (Unlike their counterparts that you find in most grocery stores.)  We picked 60 pounds of tomatoes this year and took them home to start the canning process.

 

  The salsa recipe we use is a family recipe from my dad's side of the family, and it requires a lot of bell peppers. This year we used red and yellow bell peppers and ended up with two gigantic bowls full of pepper bits.  Aren't they pretty?

     Looking back, I think the theme of the weekend was "large" because look at the size of these onions! Can you tell how enormous they are? 

They were sized for an elephant. If elephants ate onions. Which they might if given the chance. 

I know it looks like rice, but this is a huge bowl of chopped onions.  

I can still smell them when I look at this picture. 

After we soaked all the tomatoes in hot water, we peeled and peeled and peeled and peeled 'till we almost couldn't peel anymore. Here is a tiny peak at some of our peelings. 

We ended up filling up both of these:

With an amazing amount of these:

After we added all the veggies, plus the rest of the ingredients, it looked like this:

We let it cook all afternoon and we stirred and tasted and stared until it looked like it was ready.  We prepared the jars, filled them with the salsa, put the lids on, and waited to hear the "POP" noise that signals the sealing of the jars. It's actually more of a "pop" noise.  It's very subtle.  But it's a beautiful sound nonetheless because it means that we will have tasty salsa goodness for months to come.

Can you believe we were crazy enough to make 50 jars? 

It tastes so good, we might have to make 100 next year!