Dave - your comment leads to another thought. When I'm reviewing recipes that I want to try or recipes of my own that I want to modify, it really helps to understand the underlying theory of what you are trying to accomplish here. So for example, if my homemade soup calls for pasta or rice, I can either omit it, substitute potatoes, or substitute rehydrated and cooked beans. I leave out flour and fats. Tomato sauces can be modified in a number of ways, but once it gets past plain tomato sauce with citric acid or lemon juice, it needs to be pressure canned for whatever ingredient takes the longest to preserve safely (such as if I am using ground beef to make spaghetti sauce). I keep that in mind when I am reading recipes to try on the Internet. I try to evaluate whether there is anything in here that is not a safe practice, is it acidic enough for BWB, are there any no-no's for pressure canning. I also recheck the times for processing. Recently, I read with interest of canning mandarin oranges. The author got the recipe from UGA's "So Easy to Preserve". When I rechecked on canning oranges in my Ball book, everything was correct including the syrup and processing times. Even for Ball, I recheck against other recipes to make sure it all makes sense before I start.

Lola Branham is a hard dormant . The hybridizer lives on a mountain ( climate zone 4) near Pittsburgh. I wouldn't expect it to do well in a zone 8 garden, and have had other deep south friends tell me they can't grow it. As for the others, I don't know!

I purchased a Leisure Arts kit to make a Pooh afghan a couple years ago (I believe it's still a current kit though). When I finally went to stitch it . . . I have everything . . . afghan, thread, needle . . . but not the pattern! I'm guessing I took it out of the package for some crazy reason . . . but now I'm stuck. Anyone have that particular pattern?

"The Statler Stitcher® is a computer software program combined with hardware which will operate a longarm quilting machine and can stitch almost any design. A Gammill® machine equipped with Statler Stitcher® can handle an intricately patterned king-size quilt in a matter of hours instead of days, and is guided by the computer instead of by hand. The system can determine the pattern size, block size, stitches per inch, repetitions of the pattern and the offset of the pattern." If you have $30,000 to spare and room in your basement, you can have your very own quilt factory, and the glory will be a production run of one single factory quilt at a time. It will be perfectly easy to save your program and throw on quilt after whole cloth quilt--they will all turn out perfectly, and perfectly the same, at the great rate of two per day. It's an amazing machine--the "quilter" doesn't even have to stay in the room. Most factories call this person an operator. You may say you'd never churn out copies--but you COULD. Back to my painting analogy--is it original hand work, or is it limited edition print signed by the artist, or is it a paint by numbers kit? Folk art follows a tradition in a craft. Generally, folk art can be done by...folks. Whatever is happening by professional long arm quilters with these expensive machines is VERY far from the heart and soul of a quilting tradition. My grandmother and great aunt were skilled factory workers at the Derby--now known as Fruit of the Loom. You can take the machine out of the factory but you can't take the factory out of the machine. They'd no more be proud of a machine quilt than of a pair underwear they bought at Wal-Mart. My mom sends out machine pieced quilts to be long armed--it's expedient, but she'd never call it the best. The fact is, by law of supply and demand, with automatic machines churning out two quilts a day, those quilts will be less valued over the course of the years. People are smart, and all the art talk in the world doesn't change the value of reproducible work done in a few hours by automatic machine. The human element becomes entirely secondary to the machine. Some of these shows function mostly as a marketing tool for the industry, and indeed the whole shift to machine quilting was pushed along by big prizes awarded by businesses. It's very much in the interest of business to elevate the easiest. The easiest sells. BTW, lets all make a million pillowcases!!! Excuse me? This, I think, is what kills machine quilting for me, and makes me reject it as art (not high art, not fine art, but folk art.) The end product of Gammill Statler Stitcher will be indistinguishable from any other machine quilt--except it will look very, very skilled and be entirely reproducible. I feel like my values have been slowly pushed too far, my standards slowly pulled aside and I feel myself backlashing. Suddenly, I look up and say "That's ridiculous." I certainly don't mean to attack machine quilters, especially you, Annie. What you do is practically unique--find me another professional treadle quilter (yeah, I know there might be a few, but still, it's rare isn't it?) It's not black and white by any means, machine quilting has it's place, albeit with all these different categories and qualifiers. Hand quilted will always be a class alone for me, no explanations required because everybody understands a hand, a needle, and a thread.