mmmm, jelly

My ex-husband brought me some chardonnay grapes to make some jam. He brought *a lot* of grapes from his vineyard, so many that I shared some of them with my sister and fed some to the chickens. There was just no way I could have processed them all fast enough. I'm calling this a hybrid jelly, it's not a true jelly since I pureed some of the skins and added them back to the mix to avoid too much waste. It's really good though, it reminds me a bit of apple jelly. I won't lie to you, I'm glad the canning season is coming to an end. All I have left to do is some pickled beets and maybe another batch of relish.

This is a custom order of nursing pads, it felt good to get back to my machine and accomplish something. I have a bunch of wetbags to work on this week and another custom order to finish up. I'm also thinking about holiday sewing, mostly how much of it I'd like to do. I should come back to post my holiday craft list soon, the weeks are flying by!
What crafty things are dreaming up for the holidays?

Buttons

I finished knitting a sweater for Rowan last night (after I said no knitting for the week). It needs buttons so I got out the button jar. Most of these buttons are vintage from my mom and aunts, I decided to try letting Rowan search through them too. My son used to love to just sit and look at the buttons actually he still likes to look through them. Rowan though....I wasn't sure how it would work out, she still (at 17 months) likes to taste everything and sometimes doesn't transition well from things. It worked out all right though and I did find some buttons for the sweater. I'm hoping to get them sewn on while she naps so I better keep this short!

More canning, these are some bread & butter pickles. I'm branching out a bit in canning recipes and it's keeping me motivated. I also made a double batch of relish this week it's yummy. I'm going to get another batch made so we have enough to share and last through the year. I'll try to post the recipe, it's a good one.
And a custom order. I had two custom orders to complete this week and they're both done (yaaa!) This is a stack of flannel topped pads.

Off to sew on some buttons.

Canning = Sugar?

I got started on some canning today. I made a batch of icicle pickles, a batch of raspberry-banana jam, and a batch of raspberry-mango-banana jam. All the raspberries were picked locally, the bananas and mangoes not so much ;) but we had them so I used them up.

My partner and I have been talking about our dependence on sugar lately...white, refined sugar specifically. We're wanting to cut way back on our use of it. We figure that for baking we could use raw cane sugar and start looking into other alternatives like stevia. I've taken to using honey in my coffee, it took some getting used to but it's fine now. But canning-without sugar?? We did read that you can use up to 50% honey in place of white sugar in jam making but we make a lot of jam here so financially it's not really an option. Today I used 5 cups of sugar rather than the called for 6.5 cups of sugar (that's per BATCH of jam!) yes, that's a lot of sugar even at my cutting back. And the pickles (being a sweet pickle) took 3 cups of sugar. That's 13 cups of sugar I used today-in those jars in the pictures!! Really if you have any ideas on canning with less sugar or other alternatives please, please share!

(Dill) Pickled

I make these dill pickles every year, the recipe comes from my step-dad's family and a few years ago he and my mom taught us how to make them. I make them every summer for my own family. Yesterday I got 25 jars done with some perfect little cucs from a local farmer.

Relishing Relish

I've misplaced my favorite relish recipe. I searched online to find a recipe that had similar ingredients. I didn't have much success though. I did produce 13 jars of relish, however this particular recipe wasn't blog worthy and is pretty bland. If I do find my tried & true recipe I will happily share it here! If you have a favorite canning recipe please share too :-)