Giveaway! (Delayed & Instant Gratification)

This week I hit 75 followers and it is time to have fun (well, I guess we have been having fun--we are just going to have more)! I've made some good friends among you and I appreciate the time you take to visit and comment. I know that many of you first found my blog when I sent some handcrafted soap as a "thank-you" to Bonnie Hunter and she then showed it and posted a link to my blog. I mentioned then that I would give some away when I had enough followers. I had planned on doing it at 50, but I didn't get on it fast enough when that number came up. Then before I knew it there were 75 and that seemed like a good number to celebrate.

A giveaway of the Eye Fooler pattern, Tri/Recs rulers
 and some handcrafted herbal soap.

The delayed gratification will be the soap. I will email the winner a list of the scent options and make the soap fresh for them. Since it takes 3-4 weeks for soap to cure, I will send it on when it is ready to use.
The instant gratification part of the giveaway is the Eye Fooler pattern. When I posted about this quilt before it generated so much interest, I decided that pattern would make a good giveaway. And since you need the Tri/Recs rulers to make it, I've thrown those in as well (if you already have the rulers you can gift them to someone else).
There you have it!

Here is what you need to do, just be sure you are a follower and leave a comment on this post before midnight (12:00 a.m.) MST on Tuesday, July 26. On Wednesday evening I will randomly draw the winner and post the results! I will even choose a "runner-up" to receive some soap.

Just to ease the minds of any who may have less than fond memories of great-grandma's not-real-pleasant-smelling homemade soap, this soap is made with pure vegetable oils (coconut, olive and cocoa butter). There are no animal fats to smell rancid, and the essential oils make it very enticing. The colorants are all herbs and spices--no artificial colors. I started making this stuff because I have sensitive skin. After trying some my BIL made 15 years ago, it made such a difference to my skin, I jumped on board and have been making it ever since.

While we're on the subject of Eye Fooler, in spite of my forsaking this quilt for another, I have made a good-sized dent in the Eye Fooler, strictly as a leader/ender. All of the HST are finished, as are the 4-patch blocks. I'm over halfway through the Tri/Recs units and then I have an excessive amount of flying geese units to make. They aren't my favorites, so I have been avoiding them. I should have just got them over with first. It is sitting on the sidelines now, waiting for me to finish Floribunda.

Progress on my Tree of Life has been slow.
This is my second Tree of Life quilt. I finished up the first one a few years ago.

I hand quilted this one--took me about 10 months to get it finished!

These are memory quilts for my sons who have served as missionaries in South America. I try to make the blocks represent something to do with the names of the areas in which they served or the experiences they had. It was easy to find blocks that were connected to names and places in California, where my oldest daughter served, but when my first son went to Argentina things got much more complicated. Even in Barbara Brackman's "Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns" (which I poured over for hours) there are no designs related to South America that I could see. I ended up using the tree of life pattern from "Biblical Blocks" by Rosemary Makhan, along with another religious themed block and a simple "sun" block (if I'd known how to make a Mariner's Compass when I did this, I would have produced a better looking sun) to represent the sun on the Argentinian flag. Put "Spanish Squares" blocks in the corners, for the language he spoke, and called it good!
The next son went to Brazil, and that is the one I am currently stumped on. I need to stop this frustrating habit of design-as-you-go quilting. It would save me a lot of grief.

So again, I thank you for following along. Don't forget to leave your comment by midnight Tuesday. Good Luck! I'm already excited for whoever wins!

Until next time, from the little mountain valley where the sagebrush grows,
Janet O.