Hats

 Hi everyone. Happy Thursday. 

I'm posting today for Rain's Art and Dinner Date .  Her theme this week is hats, so let me share a few with you.

First  I have this page out of my junk journal where this dancing lady is wearing a  traditional sombrero cordobes. 

I put the quotes too close to the left hand edge, and since this journal doesn't lay very flat, my photo is crooked so you could read the quotes. 

This page has a lot of flowers, so I am also linking up to Aimeslee's flower challenge at Art Journal Journey. 

I also have another tag for  Tag Tuesday  and Michelle's Hats challenge.

This lady was way too big for my tag, so I glued her down and then cut her to size. I've been wanting to use her in some art though, and this challenge has finally let me do that. 👍 She comes from one of those art paper pages you find inside Somerset Studio magazine, and I ripped her out while cleaning a small stack of magazines a while back.

I also have some interesting food to share this week for the dinner date part of Rain's challenge. It might look very familiar to some of you.  I tried a recipe that Jeanie at  The Marmalade Gypsy shared somewhat recently. She wrote a post on  making preserved lemons, and I thought they sounded really interesting.  I've never tried one before, and since I had  bought a big bag of lemons to make my lemon cake a few weeks back  I figured I might as well use what's left of  them. Plus I managed to  have some fun kitchen play.

I only made 2 jars because that's all I had for lemons.

I stirred them the other day, but they still need to sit for 3 more weeks. I'll let you know what I think once they're ready to taste. 

And thanks Jeanie for sharing this recipe.

That's all for me today. I hope everyone is having a super week.

Thursday Post

 Hi everyone. Happy Thursday to you.

It is time once again for Rain's Art and Dinner Date.  

I'm not sure this counts as dinner, but last week I picked 4 pounds of grapes off my grape plant. I was excited to get this many because of the drought we have. I'm right on the border of moderate drought to  abnormally dry, and I'm not exactly sure which one  applies to my yard. The rain has been hit or miss this summer, and I think more miss than hit.

Last year when my grapes were ripening, I decided to give them a couple more days to let some of the green ones turn, but when I went back they had all dried up. Like overnight. It was weird, and also frustrating because it meant I couldn't make any grape jelly. That's why this year when the majority of the grapes had turned, I picked them. I ate a few, and they had a nice tart flavor.

Time to make some grape jelly.

To make grape jelly, you first have to make grape juice by boiling the grapes with a cup and a half of water. While they cook you mash them several times. Once you have pulpy liquid,  you then strain that liquid to get out the seeds and what's left of the skins. After that you need to refrigerate the juice for 24-48 hours, and then strain again.

I added my sugar and pectin and boiled the final product, being sure to stir it the whole time.

Grapes don't contain as much pectin as some fruit (like apples). Pectin is actually part of the cell wall structure in plants, and you use it in jelly/jam making to thicken the juice and jellify it.

Then I poured my hot jelly into sterilized canning jars and processed the ones in a boiling water bath that I will be keeping for later. I made 3 1/2 pints of jelly, but I didn't process the 1/2 pint as I will be using it right away.

This week Rain's art theme is gestures and movements. Let me share a few more photos from my trip last week to the Berkshires. Today I have  more photos from TurnPark Art Space, which was a great sculpture garden in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts. (You can read about this sculpture garden in my post yesterday if you're interested.)

These sculptures have lots of gestures and movement.

In these first 2 photos,  love how the head is unattached but then looks attached, depending on your view in these first 2 photos.

And in these next 2, let me show you this cute little sculpture. 

This next photo looks like it is early autumn, but that's because the drought I mentioned affecting most of New England this summer.

And here's my favorite photo of this sculpture.

I also liked how I captured the sculptures name but this leaf had fallen so artistically on the rest of the plaque. 

And a few more views of gestures and movements.  

That's all for me today.

Thanks for visiting, and have a great rest of your week.