Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Smells like fall

Yesterday I made progress on my Out of the Darkness quilt top. I now have the center panel put together as you can see. I had to stop work on that to work on a different project that I cannot post about yet but needs to get done soon!

I also needed to go out and harvest some of our grapes. Our grape vines were planted years ago by my great-uncle who owned our house before us. We go to the effort to prune them each year and some years we get a few and some years we get a lot - depending on the weather. This year is one of the bountiful years. These grapes are not the greatest for eating because of the seeds and the fact that the skins are kind of tough and sour. As kids we learned that you could squeeze the grape out of its skin and swallow it and suck the rest of the good flavor out of the skin. Then they were delicious! What wasn't eaten fresh off the vine my mother made into jelly and juice that lasted through the winter.

So back to my story...I picked grapes yesterday afternoon and this afternoon I pulled them all off the stems and cooked them up for juice. The boys and I won't drink all 22 quarts of juice so I will hand most of it off to my daughter and my sister's family.These are the 11 jars of juice from the first kettle of grapes and this is just a fun picture of the foam at the top of one of the jars.

3 comments:

Quilting Pirate said...

it's finally cooler here so if feels like fall this morning (YAH!)...

I'm doing into the darkness quilt as a bom as well, but I'm SOOo behind...like 5 blocks I think. I should catch up. Our local group meets in December to show off our final tops together. I'll be sure to share pictures, because we all have different color backgrounds!

YUM on the grape juice, did you make some jelly too?

Not Lucy said...

No jelly, my family isn't that excited about grape jelly. They like raspberry, blackberry and strawberry jams better.

Rosalyn Manesse said...

First of all, I love the quilt. Black background--so dramatic.
I used to make grape conserve. It had some great ingredients along with the grapes, and was lovely on toast.