Feeling the call to craft

Lately I have been really into making bracelets. Before Ezra was born I bought a ton of beads, thinking I was going to have all this time during my three-month maternity leave to bead and make things.  Yeah, I was wrong.  It wasn’t that I didn’t have free time those first couple months, but mainly it was I was trying to recover from my c-section, and learn how to live with a newborn and just general excitement of all things new.

Ezra will be two this month (TWO!), and I still really hadn’t made anything with the beads, so I decided to buy more beads.  Because that makes sense, right?  I figured that the first beads I bought didn’t really work with the jewelry I wanted to make now.  And really, I like buying things, I like to acquire.  And beads are so small, they don’t take up much space…  I can rationalize almost anything:)

So this time around I have actually made quite a few bracelets.

I’m sitting here looking at a tote filled with beads, and I’m thinking of more beads that I want, different cords, different clasps.  This hobby can get addictive, quickly!  Actually, I have a few thousand beads coming from China in a couple weeks.  It’s the first time I’ve bought from PandaHall, so we’ll see what the quality is like.

In any event, I do like to read other blogs, and so many of the homesteading blogs I read talk about knitting and other crafts.  Like this craft from Our Ash Grove, how cute are those robots?!  So now I may start to read up on knitting.

Reading over other blogs, I’m sometimes envious of the different locations folks live.  I see photos of families walking through forests with this lush greenery, and I want that!  My maternal grandparents lived near Philomath, OR and had a good many acres.  Thinking back, I’ll bet that was prime farming land.  Across the road from them were train tracks, and then it opened up into probably thousands of forest acres.  It was mossy, and green, and had a beautiful serenity to it.  It was gorgeous.  Of course, as a kid I was always worried there was going to be some killer hobo living in the woods who would make off with us, but still.  Other than that it was awesome.
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Living in desert Utah makes farming or garden growing a bit of a challenge.  We try to ration our water and only water the areas that need it, spot watering.  We don’t have grass in the backyard.  We have an abundance of tomatoes and Jesse’s peppers seem to be doing well.  We had some peaches this year and many strawberries.  Our zucchini have been going crazy and we look to have some good acorn and spaghetti squash here soon.  But I still want more.  *sigh*

We had so many tomatoes we decided to get some jars and a water bath canner to put them up.  At work the next day, I got a text from Jesse that he had dropped our new water bath pot the night before (after I went to bed) and it was rendered inuseable as a water bath canner.  He has since remade it into a solar oven.  We then decided that we probably needed a pressure canner anyway, and bought one on Amazon.  This is the model we bought.

The day after that mishap he texted me that he had our brand new Vitamix blender cannister drying upside down on the baby bottle rack and it fell onto the floor and chipped a chunk out of the pour spout.  I’d say that blender was about two weeks old at the time.  We are not having luck with our new items.

The other night we decided to can some tomatoes because hey, we have a ton of tomatoes (and still a lot of green ones that will be ready in a little bit).  Now, I personally had never canned before but totally did not expect it to take as long as it did.  First we rinsed off the tomatoes, then blanched them in simmering water, cooled them in ice water, peeled off the skins and put them into a large stew pot (like this) to simmer.  I thought we’d just throw them in and turn them on, but Jesse told me we have to simmer slowly and work to add tomatoes in so the batch didn’t scortch.  It look many hours to do this process.  Then I added in onions and we started to cook it down to reduce.  I sampled it and didn’t like the amount of tomato seeds that were in it, so we decided to press it through a fine mesh sieve into a new pot.  We used a spatula to press through what tomato flesh we could, but it wasn’t a whole lot that made it through.  Well, then it was basically just tomato juice, not the thick chunky-type sauce base that I wanted, so we reduced it some more.

We were watching the latest Star Trek movie (it was great, by the way, I recommend it) while waiting for the juice to reduce.  I then added in some garlic.  Probably waaayyyy too much garlic, but meh, garlic is good for you, right?  It finally came time to jar up the mixture and we got to use our new pressure canner!  Jesse went to bed about 2:30am and I had to stay up until about 3am so the pressure canner could release its heat natually.  We totally forgot to add vinegar to the water in the canner, so our cans have this hard-water-type build up on the outside of the jars.  One of the jars didn’t get filled all the way, so we didn’t pressure can that one, just put it directly into the fridge.  I’ve poured it over quiche slices a couple times.  It’s very liquid, but has a nice flavor.  Next time we either need to squinch out the seeds ahead of time, or I just have to suck it up and eat the seeds.

It’s fun to grow things and put up the food to eat later, but it’s definitely a learning process.

Speaking of learning, I’m pretty sure our rabbits are not knocked up yet, but they don’t like to be held so it’s tough to tell when I cannot feel around their bellies.  The more mellow one batted at Jesse yesterday when he tried to pick her up, so maybe she is pregnant.  It’s just, I never saw the buck actually complete the act when they were together…  Who knows, crazier things have happened.  She would be due around the middle of the month, so I guess we’ll just wait and see.