My Creativity Strikes Again

My mom's friend had some extra grapes which she offered to my mom, who didn't need them but said that I wanted them (which is true). Thanks Jaque! I've been on a learn-how-to-can slash food storage kick lately, so I packed Lincoln up and we drove to Hooper this morning to learn how to make grape juice.

First you have to take all the grapes off the vines. Not too bad, except that Lincoln wanted to "help". He kept putting grapes that were still on the vines in the bucket with the grapes we'd already pulled off the vine, and picking up the de-vined grapes and squishing them in his hands, and picking up vined and de-vined a like and throwing them on the sidewalk. We couldn't distract him to save our lives (or our grapes). You can imagine what his clothes looked like. Finally my mom had the brilliant idea to take the grapes in the house and de-vine them in the kitchen sink. Lincoln is to short to reach the sink. Problem solved.

Then you put all the grapes into a big steamer/juicer and you let the water boil underneath it for two hours, stirring every half hour. After an hour some of the juice is ready and you can pour it into the quart jars. After the juice is in the jar, you stick a lid on it, screw the little metal ring on nice and tight and wait for it to seal. Not too hard, just time consuming. I got 24 quarts of grape juice out of the deal. Not too shabby at all.

During the times we were waiting my mom attempted to show me how to sew. I am attempting to make burp clothes and a quilt for Aaron's sister Stacey's new baby Jeremiah (he was born today!!!). But I have never learned to sew, and so my mom (who doesn't really sew all that much herself) is having a real time trying to teach me. I made the mistake of buying stripey cloth to sew onto the cloth diapers (that's how you make the burp cloths, they are really cute) so you can tell exactly how crooked my sewing is. You can see it in the picture. But I got two other designs that aren't stripey so those will probably look better. We only had time to do the stripey ones today. I never knew sewing would be such stressful, concentrated work. I hope I get better at it though. It felt so fulfilling to be able to look at the burp clothes I completed, even though they weren't sewn perfectly, and think that I made that. I guess there's something to Pres. Uchtdorf's talk at the Relief Society broadcast after all. I still have more burp clothes to do, and we didn't even get started on the quilt, but that will just give me a good excuse to go back up to Hooper and use my mom's sewing machine.

Other good news besides my new nephew Jeremiah, Whitney Taylor (Aaron's cousin and my good friend, who set up Aaron and I) got engaged today!!! Congratulations!