Summer Goodies and Guild Quilting

These pretty jars are likely the last ones of this summer.  I canned them this week and am quite happy to say that I won't be going in the okra again very soon.  Not that the okra are  finished, of course, they would keep producing until the first frost if I continued to pick them two or three times weekly.  But I have no plans to continue.  We have enough in the freezer and pickled in jars for this year at least.

 I have to admit, however, that they sure look nice.  I was able to put up some more tomatoes, this time they are canned with Italian seasonings so that when I put them in spaghetti sauce or use them for pizza, they will already have some of the seasonings I would normally add. Also the tomatoes will taste better if we choose to eat them from the jar.  These were canned whole or cut into large chunks because I have the feeling that we'll eat most of them this way.

Two pints have pickled sweet peppers in them.  I don't eat banana peppers unless they are cooked into something like a gravy, but some of my boys love them.  So I decided to try a few pints.  They look good, and hopefully they'll taste as good.

At a guild meeting of the Louisiana Cotton Quilters Guild a few months ago, we voted to make a Christmas themed quilt to raffle as a fundraiser.  Guild members met a few times to paper piece the quilt blocks, then one or two members worked on sewing the blocks together.  It's a beautiful quilt top.  Because I knew I'd be unable to met to either piece the blocks or put them together, I decided to offer to quilt it.

 At our June meeting, we voted again to allow me to quilt it.  There was quite a lively discussion about whether we should hand quilt it, but there's already a quilt planned for hand quilting.  That one is to raise money for the Cottonport Museum.  In the end, the quilt found it's way to my studio.  I loaded it onto the Innova before I realized that I hadn't taken a photo.  So here's a photo of a section of the top.  It's more difficult to see, of course, but you can see that the colors are very Christmasy in shades of red and green and a golden yellow.  I promise more photos later.  I actually took several photos but they are even worse than this one!  I'm such a horrid photographer!

 In the darkest green and in the yellow there's a scroll or vine motif, which I like to do, so I'm pretty sure I'll use that somewhere in the quilting.  I've already decided to quilt a wreath design in the red square.  I'm just not sure what I want to do with that green.  It's an odd shape and I need to fill the quilt with as much quilting as I can.  Because so many different people worked on the piecing, there are some sections that are a bit loose and I think that dense quilting will resolve some of the issues that come with loose stitches.  Any suggestions for a good, dense quilting motif that is maybe just a little Christmas?  I sure could use some help with this!