Another County Fair

Once again the county fair has come and gone.

While I don't consider myself a great quilter or an amazing cook, it's exciting to participate and see how I do. I was pleasantly surprised with the outcomes this year.

Here's my quilt that won grand champion in the quilting class

 

 

I was pretty surprised - I mean I worked very hard on it, I just expected to get wiped out by some of the amazing quilters out there. I spent 9 months working on this quilt, and I hand embroidered different stitches onto each block's border. I think I enjoyed that the best - finding a stitch I wanted to learn (thanks for the book Liz), learning a new stitch and seeing how it turned out.
Anyways - that's my new Christmas quilt for my bed.

Lest I bore you - I also entered some canned peaches and peach jelly, both of which won grand champion in their classes. My dutch apple pie, banana bread, canned tomatoes and pears also did really well. The pie, jelly & banana bread recipes are on my cooking blog.

So that you know I'm not trying to turn this into a brag fest - they thought my caramels were too hard, and they still didn't like my rhubarb pie. Next year - again. I thought they were perfect, but I must have different tastes than the judges apparently.

The real praise goes out to our daughter. She entered some peaches she canned a couple of weeks ago, and she won grand champion in the children's division. We were pretty proud of her. Our youngest entered a pillow she had sewn and won a participation award.

It was so fun to see what our friends had been working on and to see how they did.
Our only problem now is how to get that animal smell out of the quilt!