The Beginning...

Today is my first day of blogging and I started this to not only show off my quilting stuff to my fellow quilters but also to talk about my latest adventures in canning, cooking, travel, etc.  Can't promise to always be exciting but will try to make this entertaining.

Today my goal is to get a quilt block completed for another one of my swaps plus get the
tree block (shown below) in the mail.

The block I am mailing today is for Tara at Stashbee.Blogspot.com. It was an "improv" block that the Queen Bee of the Month asked that we only use Kona Azure for the sky background. Other than that it was anything goes. I got very lucky and found this really neat fabric that was similar in color with birds and tree branches. I decided to go with a simple block to show off the tree branch fabric. The little block to the side is my signature block (can you tell I REALLY liked this fabric!) I decided to hide my information in the branches to feature another one of the birds that I could not get in the original block.

Also this past weekend, my dear husband and I decided to visit Eastern Market in Detroit (www.detroiteasternmarket.com).  We were able to score a deal on some fresh green beans so we (I) decided to try out my new pressure canner that I had just received for my birthday.  Turns out one bushel of fresh green beans makes 17 quarts and 6 pints of canned green beans.  We ended up having to stay up until 4am on Saturday monitoring the canner since I was so nervous about using it for the very first time.  Every hiss and bit of steam release from the valves had me jumping and worried about the cost of having to potentially redo the kitchen ceiling.

So to keep me from going nuts I decided to clean out my canning "pickle mis-adventures" from last year.    The pickles we had made were a really odd combination of sweet, clove, and garlic.  I don't mind being adventurous but these did not taste good.  Ended up dumping over a dozen jars into the compost bin. My thoughts were I rather do that than force family / friends to pretend to like them.  I did have my cousin try them and after being polite about them and her saying things like "there is nothing like a homemade pickle" or "that was an unusual recipe"....I finally got her to admit that they were not worth keeping.  Guess I need to find a better recipe.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated on a better recipe for dill and/or garlicky pickles.