Quality Time - Apple Pies

It's that time of year again!  Mom and I set aside last Sunday for cutting up some of Bob's apples (he's mom's neighbor) and putting together pies.  In the past we've made it an all day sort of adventure, and that's extremely tiring even with 5 people working on it, so decided that since it was going to be the two of us, we'd aim for 4 hours.  Here's how it went:

 

 

Isn't it amazing how one half of an apple can equal one quarter of another?

I was working on quartering apples while mom peeled and cored.

So I'm 5'8" and my hand width is about six inches, this is a big apple!  And most of them were this size.

Look at how tight the meat is to the seeds!  I always feel like the center is more cavernous than these ones were, very healthy harvest this year.

Here's mom and myself hard at work!  I got dad to step away from football action to take some action shots of us.  I probably should make him something nice to eat soon... :)

Oh yeah, look at that sugar flow!  And mom is more than ready to take on that pie crust.

And a shot from the other side, isn't mom's sugar tin the best?  She's had that tin my whole life and it works so well.

Stages of apple: quartered & peeled, chopped into bite-sized pieces, then sugared & spiced.

This is becoming mom's annual pie picture, I have at least two other years worth of this picture.

Mom decided to make Happleberry pies this year!  We had such a good huckleberry harvest that she put some in all the pies.

And here they are waiting for tops.  I didn't get any pictures of them done, silly me, but we end up sticking them in the freezer for future use.  We made 15 this year I believe, and mom is going to make applesauce with the rest of the apples.

Ah, here's pictures of pies I made a few days later.  Mom ended up cutting some extra apples up for me so I made a pie for John to take to work and some small pies for the ladies I work with.

Top crust on and crimped.  Thank you mom for teaching me a nice crimp!

 

 

And some finish photos.  Mmmmm, it sure did smell good for a while in our house!

 

 

And here's an artistic photo to round out your apple pie experience:

 

I love how the crust is glowing, although it does make me hungry.

 

One thing I thoroughly appreciate is the time I got to spend with my mom, just chatting about nothing and everything, spending quality time together.  I'm reminded all too often how fortunate I am to have the opportunities I do to spend this kind of time with my parents and I try to take advantage of it as much as I can.  No regrets from this child!  By the way, one of mom and my next projects is to make her a new apron, the one she has is quite literally falling apart at the seams.  We should be picking out fabric for it soon from her stash, yay!

 

Thank you for visiting!

 

~Brandy

 

 

A Perfect Picnic (with TWO GIVEAWAYS!)

The giveaway is now closed and the winners have been emailed :)

Hello, and happy blog hop day!  John and I had a really nice time on our picnic, I'm going to tell you all about it in a moment and show you some pictures (ok lots, and this was me cutting back, it may take a minute to load).  And after I share our adventure, you will have the opportunity to enter one of TWO giveaways!  One will be for US residents, the other for our international visitors.

Also, be sure to visit our sponsors for this hop:

 

Riley Blake Designs

&

Peterboro Basket Company

Here are the other who share this lovely day with me:

Wednesday June 4

Quilt Taffy

Pampered Pettit

Creatin' in the Sticks

Miss Priss Quilts

Life in the Scrapatch

That's Sew Julie

 

Quilt

So first off, when I caught whiff of a possible picnic hop I was very excited.  I'd been making blocks last summer with the idea of using them for a car quilt, hadn't made any more progress on it since, and here was a golden opportunity!  It would also count as a busted UFO for this year which is so nice.  At the time the hop was announced I had all the outer blocks finished, I just needed to finish the center medallion and had already cut the diamonds for one.  And I'm going to toot my own horn on my point matching, because it took me redoing one of the points 6-7 times before I finally started marking and pinning them, and here's what you get when you do that:

 

Practically perfect!



Here's the center and top all put together:

 

 

In case you're wondering, the majority of the red, white, and blue fabric came from Keepsake Quilting, then I added some of the whites and the gray from my LQS Stash, who some of you may recognize as being a featured store in the latest Quilt Sampler.  The blue came from the quilt shop in Pomeroy, WA called Rather-Be's, who I discovered when we held my Great-Grandma's 90th birthday in their retreat center a month ago.  They carry a lot of fabric especially for Quilts of Valor.

Then I created the back out of jean material donated by my Grandpa Jim, Uncle Jerry, dad, John, and myself.  I actually used up the majority of my collection to make this, but that's ok, mom has like 4 bins of jeans in the basement that I plan on raiding in the future... ha!  Like she'd let me!

 

It was John's idea to mimic the front using the dark and light materials.  To get the light star points I had to turn my jeans inside out though, but it's jeans, you can't really tell it's the insides.  And I love how the checkerboard pattern looks!  Also, really liked how quickly the 6 inch points go together as apposed to the 2.5 inch.

This quilt has a lot of firsts for me in it: fussy cut, applique, flying geese, lone star, inner and outer borders, sashing, and working with jeans.  I also used a 1 inch thick poly batting I got at JoAnn Fabrics (it was on sale, 50% off), and it was way less expensive than buying multiple precut battings ($7 vs $60, totally worth it).  I am going to write another post in a couple days that will chronicle more of the making of this quilt, so be sure to come back and visit me for a more in-depth look, and some good pointers I have for the whole Y-seam and point-matching adventure.

 

Basket

Apparently I needed to explore the Peterboro Baskets website more thoroughly because I sure wish I'd gotten our basket from them!  Especially since they are so generously offering a discount right now (20% off use QUILT as your coupon code thru September 30th) and it's free shipping in the US.  They have a picnic basket for two that I would really love to have, and will probably pick up here in the future.

We found a basket from Hobby Lobby that cost almost the same, but the quality is really lacking, especially in the strength of the handle.  However, we made do!  The post previous to this one shows how I made a reversible picnic basket liner for it.  Here's how it turned out:

 

 

 

Menu

For our menu we decided to take a bunch of snack-type food since a full meal wouldn't be a relaxing for us.  I found a mini watermelon, summer sausage, a party cheese mix that I cut up myself, we had a bunch of Ritz crackers already, some Easy Cheese for me, pretzels, carrots and homemade vege dip (I'll share the recipe in another post) and Coca Cola in glass bottles:

This Pampered Chef cutting board is the perfect size to take on a picnic, and their knives all come with protective cases too.

I may be a Pampered Chef consultant, but I do love my Tupperware as well!

It all looks so festive loaded in the basket!  Oh, that white lid is covering some M&M's I took along and never ate, I'm actually eating them as I write this post!

Picnic

Setting up on the banks of Mill Creek :)  This is the back part of my parent's land, we affectionately refer to their land as Rocky Acres.  You can see how pretty the California Poppies and Bachelor Buttons were that day.

We were concentrating really hard on getting our colas to clink hahaha

A lovely snack plate.

John splashing around, it was ~80 degrees, so this was very cooling he said.

I chose to lay on the quilt and eat some more while he played in the water.  The pillow was a good idea to bring along, next time we'll take two.

Enjoying the breeze.

Wait!  A breeze?  Why, that's why I have kites!  So we busted out this Americana one my grandmother actually MADE, and I promptly broke it.  Now I need to find a new spar, we may be in for a road trip :)

Fortunately I brought more than one kite, so we still got to fly for a while.

This was John's second time flying, he's a quick learner.

It was nice to take some time for ourselves with no plan, just to go out to the property and do what we please.  We had also brought along the cribbage board to play but it was too breezy for cards to be laying about this time.  We'll try again this weekend.

GIVEAWAYS!!

 



Giveaway #1 - United States only (see stipulations below)

OH YES!  You're seeing this right, I have for my United States viewers this very lovely, local, bottle of Riesling!  I live in Walla Walla, WA, and we are becoming very well know for our wines.

I do have some stipulations however, as shipping is pretty strict for wine.  As I said before, this is limited to United States readers.  And I am unable to ship to anyone in Massachusetts, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Utah.  And it's very important that an adult be there to sign for it's arrival, because if it gets returned to me I'm not trying again, I will keep it and will use it to cook with.  (I understand some people view this as sinful... lol)
 

Giveaway #2-International and MA, ND, NH, UT residents

One of the most summer-rific charm packs I could find!  Bartholo-meow's Reef by tim&beck for Moda.  I think this is just too much fun, and it's both boy and girl friendly if you use the right filler colors with this charm pack.  I can't get over that walrus's smirk heeheehee!

 

OK!  Here's how you enter:

Leave me a comment with your city and state/country.  You may also feel free to leave kind words, I always love that of course.  And I shall do my best to respond to you all!  This giveaway will be open until June 10th, and I will use the random number generator to do my drawings, then contact the winners on the 11th.

 

Thank you for visiting, I hope you'll stop by in a few days for my post on making my quilt, and remember the post below shows how I made my picnic basket liner.  Have a fabulous summer, I bet I'll see you in July for some Christmas happenings!

 

~Brandy

It's a baking kind of week

I had a Pampered Chef party this weekend, and we made Cheesy Bruschetta, and oh my lord, it was sooo good!  Here's a tiny picture of it:

 

The other project I will have this week, well, besides pumpkin pie and chocolate-banana cookies, is for my dad's birthday is Saturday, and I have decided a Chewbacca cake is in order.  I found this picture earlier this year and just loved it!

 

I even already own the 3D bear pan it needs!  We are looking at getting some Star Wars themed plates and such too, it will be great.  BLT's and mac & cheese for dinner, sounds like a great follow up to turkey day to me!


Thanks for stopping by, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Oh, and I have sewn 8 of my blocks together for mom's quilt, it's supposed to be done by Saturday...

UPDATE!

Here's how my Chewbacca turned out, I wanted him to look more like the adult, and John made him a Millennium Falcon to stand on :)

 

My dad loved it :)