Summer 2017 Scrapbook Done!

I was so happy when I finished this scrapbook that soon after I finished it I ordered prints for my next scrapbook.  You can read about that one soon!  I started this one back in October and though it took me a long time to complete, I had a blast doing it!

I'm sure you will see from the pictures that I'm not a professional scrapbooker.  I keep things rather simple as my inventory is slim.  I don't really have the desire to increase my stash of scrapbook supplies because I enjoy the simplicity of the craft.  I basically stuck to patterned paper, washi tape and rubber stamps.  A true scrapbooker might laugh at that!

I recently saw a professionally done scrapbook of someone's Disney trip.  It was amazing!  There are actual professional scrapbookers.  Can you believe that?  I'm not talking people who sell scrapbook materials and offer classes to help you scrapbook.  I'm talking people who will scrapbook your vacation for you.

Anyway, those people clearly put me to shame, but I have still found a bit of fun in my new little hobby.  And besides, it's a great way to chronicle our family adventures and have something to look at and reminisce about without the the use of technology.  And I think we can all agree that sometimes we need to take what we call in my house, a tech break.

Summer 2017 was a great year with many fun summer trips.  2018 was a good one too, and I'm sure I'll still have fun scrapbooking it...once I get to it!

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A Summer Tribute
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Watermelon Candy Crochet Beanie

This hat took me far longer than it ought to have taken.  But I am still pleased with the results.  And sadly, I have put my crochet hook down for a bit because every time I crochet I seem to aggravate the knot behind my left shoulder.  I've tried my tips and tricks.  And you can find them here!  But for some reason that knot is relentless.  My hands, while they do get fatigued after long use, were fine.  This time it was just the dumb knot.

If you have any tips or tricks please leave them in the comment section below.  Do you use ergonomic crochet hooks?  Let me know what ones and if you think they help.  There's also a posture corrector that I keep seeing online and I'm curious if that could help.  It looks like the thing my son wore when he broke his collar bone.  Has anyone used one of those to correct posture while crocheting?

Anyway, here are some pictures of the hat on my head (with extremely poor lighting!).  It is a simple beanie and should work up quickly if you don't take a thousand breaks.  Do you like the little pompom I put on top?  I hesitated about that, but in the end decided to go with it.  How about the flower?  In the future I'll have to include instructions how to make that simple creation.  It's super easy and very fast.

Here is a post with a link to directions on how to make this simple crochet beanie.  For this hat I used a J-hook, but I'm sure you can work with many other sizes depending on the thickness of your yarn.

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My Vegetable Garden 2018

What's more homemade than home grown vegetables?

This year I decided to try again at growing vegetables.  I hadn't grown any since we lived in our old house.  And my success there was minimal.  I think we had some soil issues, too much shade and a proliferation of pill bugs.  After a couple years there I stopped trying.  

But with our new yard and more sun, we had a mildly successful year.  I will definitely do it again next year.  For the fist year I decided to keep it simple.  I planted one hill of summer squash, two hills of zucchini, six tomato plants and two hills of cucumbers.  I threw in a few green beans but the bunnies demolished those before my husband got the fence up.

I dug my garden the old fashioned way.  And perhaps the stupid way.  The day before I put my garden in I helped my friend with hers.  Pitchforking two gardens two days in a row resulted in a very sore arm and hand.  In the future I will keep this in mind and perhaps invest in some sort of tilling tool.

One of the best things I think I did for my garden was to cover the fresh dirt in cardboard and newspaper.  To ensure it didn't just fly away, I covered it with brown cedar mulch.  Due to that I had barely any weeds.  I'm talking just a few tufts of grass poking out from in between the seams.  I will definitely do this technique again.  My mom does this and I saw it on Pinterest. If your garden is not immense, you should give it a try for sure.

My yellow squash didn't produce a whole lot of great fruit.  That could be for many reasons, but I did see squash bugs in the flowers.  One zucchini plant did quite well, but the other only produced a few zucchini.  The tomatoes produced well, but I was hoping for a bit more.  I had six plants and probably 7 or 8 tomatoes from each plant.

Next year I want to fertilize better.  I went with some Pinterest tips and used coffee grounds and eggshells.  And while my garden did ok, I am sure with more nutrients it could have done even better.  I think this worked well for the cucumbers and tomatoes, but my squash did not have high yields as I mentioned

Just the other day I took in the last of my green tomatoes and put them on the windowsill.  Frost has arrived and frozen green tomatoes aren't that great.

I'm sad I have so few pictures.  I'm not sure what I was thinking!  Next year I'll be sure to take more.

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Summer Squash Casserole
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Strawberries!

Strawberry season has come and gone but we made it out this year in June to enjoy the delicious fruit.  By the time we arrived one of the fields was already picked out.  Fortunately for us, the farm opened a second field.  We picked the small but very sweet Jewel variety.  While I liked these candy-sweet berries, I will admit disappointment at not being able to harvest some bigger fruit with a little more tang.  

My husband and kids holding the fruits of our labor

It was a seasonably hot day and I made sure to cover the kids and myself in sunscreen.  These past few years I've also been wearing a hat.  I used to be very self-conscious about it, but I soon realized no one really cares and I hated my head burning.  My hair is not super thick and even 15 minutes in the sun can result in a painful burn.  I found my hat at The Green Dragon, an open air flea market I had heard about in some of the Amish fiction that I read.  That was a fun find.

Here I am with my kids.

It was a fun day all around with sweet, fresh strawberries, strawberry doughnuts and strawberry cheesecake ice cream.  We will be back again next year I'm sure!

This strawberry cheesecake ice cream was so good!  The stripe of jam running through it was absolutely amazing!

Using some of the strawberries we picked, I made a small batch jam.  You can find it here.

These strawberry donuts were just too hard to resist.

Click here to see where we picked strawberries this year.  We go other places some years but this place is by far the most entertaining.  


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Low Sugar Small Batch Strawberry Jam
The Pumpkin Patch
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Lower Sugar Small Batch Strawberry Jam

The day we went to the strawberry patch I knew I wanted to make some jam.  But I also knew I didn't want to make a whole lot of it.  In the past I've made far too much and we just don't eat it very often so I feel like it goes to waste.  But I still wanted some jam.  Just the right amount of jam.  One jarful of jam.  And I googled the word jarful.  It's a thing.

If your jam gets foamy you can scrape it off before you dump it in the jar.

I needed to find a small batch recipe.  So where did I turn?  If you have read my blog for even a little while you might have already guessed.  I turned to Pinterest of course.  There were several small batch recipes and they were all very similar.  I opted to use the basic bones of the recipes I saw, but halve the sugar and replace the rest with granulated Splenda.

The result?  A wonderfully sweet jam with half the sugar of many recipes.  We all enjoyed it very much.

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Lower Sugar Small Batch Strawberry Jam

Ingredients:

1 pound or 3 3/4 cups fresh strawberries
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup granulated Splenda 
2 tablespoons lemon juice

First wash and drain your berries.  Then remove the stems.  Next, slice the strawberries and add them to a medium sized pot.  

Stir in sugar and Splenda.  Bring mixture to a boil over medium heat, stirring continually, then add lemon juice.

Boil (and keep stirring!) until jam reaches 220 degrees on a candy thermometer.  If you don't have one, it takes about 15-20 minutes of boiling.  If you don't quite get to quite 220 the jam will be fine, just not as thick.    

Shortly before your jam is ready take a clean jar and fill it with hot tap water.  A heated jar is less likely to crack when filled with hot jam.  Dump the water out just before you add your jam.  Once your jam is at 220, add it into the warm jar using a wide mouth funnel.  Put a lid on it and let it cool on the counter.

Once the jar is cool put it in the refrigerator and enjoy it within 2 months.  

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The recipe came out great and I loved that I could easily sub in the Splenda.  The recipes I saw did not recommend Splenda but I wanted a lower sugar recipe.  I knew that I could not use all Splenda if I wanted the same sort of consistency so that's why I opted only to sub in half.

TIP!  You can try using granulated stevia if you want to avoid artificial sweeteners. 

TIP!  Use thawed frozen berries instead of fresh.  Just measure them before you thaw them.

Let me know if you like jam or if you try this recipe in the comment section below.  


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