Harvest Time

As mentioned in my last post I had some canning to get to, I also had some honey to extract.  I spent most of Sunday extracting honey and cleaning the sticky, sweet mess.

The extractor all ready for some frames!

A river of honey from the extractor.

This is a frame of honey before uncapping and putting into the extractor.

Some of the honey jars, there are many more..........
















Monday was spent making two batches of hot pepper jelly and making juice from grapes to be ready to make jelly today.  Grape juice is such a beautiful rich color.........

The honey is in the back, the first batch of grape jelly is to the left, the relish in the center (both made today)  and the hot pepper relish to the right, only planning on making one more batch of grape jelly then the canning is done for this year.  I still have some honey to bottle probably another 10 or more pounds, so far I have over 70 pounds, thanks to my very productive honey bees!



Hoping to get everything put away tomorrow and plan on spending a little time relaxing in my sewing room before getting some outside fall prep work done!

Catching Up

This weekend a friend came for a visit we spent the weekend in my sewing room "catching up" on our lives and sewing.  It was just the boost I needed to dig out some of the projects that were ohhhhh so close to being complete.

I got the backing for the flannel shirt quilt finished, it is now ready for quilting, I just need to work on a pieced binding.  I finished piecing the backing of another quilt that has been a UFO for several years, will make the binding for that one this week. 

I also dug out the Marcus Sew Along, I had stopped working on it because I was not happy with the second light fabric that I chose, it was a mystery quilt and I wasn't clever enough to realize it was for the setting blocks, with the help of my friend I decided to use cheddar instead.......it looks better.  I will probably tea stain this one to darken the light fabric but I am still not "in love" with this one.  I will shop my stash for a backing and make the binding soon.  This year I challenged myself to use more of my stash, this quilt is 97% from my stash!

I am also finishing up the Mastering Miniatures BOM that I started a few years ago.  I had some of the setting blocks to finish, they are now complete and there were 14 blocks that needed to be pieced, yesterday I did nine of them I am hoping to finish up the last five today.

 Off to the sewing room to work on today's goals and later I have zucchini relish, grape jelly, tomato sauce and hot pepper jelly to keep me busy for the days that follow!