email Youtube

Home
Galleries
Blog
Workshops & Calendar
Store
Resources
About
Contact

The San Juan County Courthouse and Fair Centennial Quilt

My best friend, Marie J., is spearheading a project to make a Centennial Quilt to celebrate a double centennial celebration: both the San Juan County (Washington) courthouse (where she works) AND the County Fair (the absolute best country fair in the entire US of A) turn one hundred this year. She put out a call for one hundred blocks, to surround a central medallion. She’ll then assemble these blocks into a top which will be quilted by Orcas Island (part of San Juan County) long-arm quilter Keri Leighton Stone.

Even expatriates like me (we moved away from the island in summer ’04), are allowed to make blocks, so I finally got one done today. I hope to have another one done by Monday, and send them both off to Marie. Anyway, I used to enter all sorts of stuff in the fair….flowers, fruit, jams, baked goods, knitting, quilts, photographs….it was always so much fun to see who had made what (with 7000 year-round residents on San Juan Island, you knew a lot of folks, and more by name) in any given year. “Food Preservation,” for beer, wine, jams, jellies, preserves, pickles, pickled or canned meats and canned veggies and fruits was a favorite division, and I was able to help the official judges every year for about five years, so I elected to do a block with some of my jams:

The jar on the left reads “from Sarah Ann Smith’s ’04 kitchen: Skagit Valley Strawberry Jam,” and the one on the right is “Hannah Heights, S.J. Isl. Wild Blackberry Jelly, September 2003.” The blue ribbon is one I won for my strawberry jam the last year we lived there.

Every year the Catholic Church would send a flat-bed truck over to the fertile Skagit Valley, on the mainland, and come back with buckets of washed and hulled berries, sold as a fund-raiser. I’d buy 15-30 pounds every June and July and put up jams for the coming year. Then, in August the blackberries would ripen on cue with the local saying: when the blackberries are ripe, it’s time to go back to school. The berries are very seedy, so jams could be rather chewy; I decided to try jelly making for the first time, and oh heaven! The only thing better is fresh island blackberries plucked warm from the sun on an early autumn afternoon.

Now…..having given up on kleenex I’m taking my roll of TP to the sofa to hack and wheeze….

Comments are closed.