Weck Jars - my new favorite thing!

So several family members gave me money for my birthday this year, which always leaves me feeling a bit overwhelmed... what to buy with these special dollars?? Luckily this year I had already been drooling over weck jars - that is, glass canning jars with rubber gaskets. With money from my parents and some of my great in-laws (thanks guys & gals - you know who you are!), I went online and ordered Weck jars from their U.S. site. I was a bit worried what shipping would come to, because unlike most websites I order from, they didn't calculate shipping until you had entered all your information. It turned out that shipping was a quite reasonable (for 2 large fedex-ed boxes of glass!) forty dollars. I could have ordered more jars!

I ordered 7 different types of jars - tulip and mold jars in a variety of sizes, and apart from the smallest which comes in a 12 pack, I got 6 of each. Not bad for what I spent, and knowing that there is no BPA, no parts to throw away (based on a great post I read a while ago on the ability to reuse the rubber gaskets), and seeing how pretty they look makes it even better!

With so many styles and sizes, I had a hard time choosing, so I first sat down and thought about the things I would be using the jars for. I started with the definite uses and moved into the dream uses. For example, definite uses would be apple sauce, freezer jam, tomatoes, while dream uses would be home made pizza sauce, canned green beans. Obviously some or all of these definitely uses will happen this year, while only some of my dream uses will happen this year (no pressure canner and no more green beans to harvest = that dream being a next year event).

So far I have only used them for freezing things, no true canning, but that is on the list of things to do this week, as we have a whole heck of a lot of apples waiting to be made into applesauce. Just look how pretty the ground beef looks in there surrounded by plastic baggies of meat...

I can only imagine how much more food we will be able to fit (and organize well!) in the freezer with these jars! I am thinking I might be needing more jars soon... :)

Field apple harvest

Last night Little M and I took the truck down to the bottom field and parked under the apple tree that is hidden in the trees and shrubs of the riparian buffer at the edge of the creek. We had already taken the stroller down there and picked what I could reach from the ground, and being without a ladder (it's still up at the rental house), I suddenly realized that by standing in the bed of the truck, or up on the sides of the bed even, that I would be able to reach way more!

After maneuvering the truck to a couple of different locations (including backing it right into the branches of the shrubby understory and barely avoiding a hidden t-post - oops!), we had collected a whole lot of great apples! The backseat was full.

All told we had 2 cloth bags full to the brims (plus what we had gotten last week from ground level!). There is still one branch up there that I couldn't reach, but that can feed the deer or bears. Not a bad haul for a tree that we don't water or maintain at all! I see lots of applesauce in our future - yum!

And we still have 2 apple trees in our orchard with plenty of fruit on them. The majority of those apples though will be going to friends of ours who helped us move a lot of rocks on the rental property, they have a cider press and will be making them into cider.

31 days worth of inspiration!

Does anyone else read Simple Mom? I do regularly, and this weekend Tsh's Weekend Links post had some great links. My favorite was her link to Chatting at the Sky's 31 days link up list of blogs, where I found a great link up with hundreds of blogs that are doing their own 31 days projects on a wide variety of topics. Doing a bit more clicking around online got me to Nester's site where I realized that there are a bunch of bloggers hosting the 31 days link up for anyone to join who is doing a 31 day series of posts this month.

While I definitely don't have time this month to do a series like all of these bloggers, I can tell I'll be busy this month just going through all of the interesting looking project themes, let alone following along with some of them. While I definitely don't have time right now to do more than a couple of Pinterest-inspired projects in the next 31 days, and I won't have time to totally get it together in the next 31 days, or get rid of things I don't know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful in my house, I am looking forward to getting ideas and planning some winter projects and goals along with the new-to-me blogs I'm finding over there!

Our Gallery Wall

This weekend Little M and I spent a gloomy Saturday inside. The rain held off most of the time, unless we headed out for a walk, in which case it started coming down on us. So we hung out inside and I finally tackled the gallery wall that I have been dreaming about for months! I got my initial inspiration and settled on a final pattern through Pinterest, and I absolutely love how it turned out!

It took the better part of the day, but that was with an almost two year old helping... needless to say I could have busted it out much quicker without my little 'helper' moving frames and pictures around for me!

I started by making 2 parallel lines from string on the wall, and planned out where my frames would go below and above the horizontal gap running the length of the gallery wall. Then I started filling in the frames, going left to right. The first ones were a bit trickier because of the light switch, and I had to really pick and choose. That meant that I had to go back through my arrangement on the floor and redo the order.

We got a lot of the frames up, but then we had to take a break for Little M's afternoon nap. Once she was back awake and had eaten her afternoon snack, we started up again and got all of the frames up on the wall around supper time. I did some switching of pictures during the evening, and everything was all done before her bedtime. I really love how it all turned out! We still have a bunch of pictures to get printed or enlarged, so ignore some of the placeholders :)

The best thing about the project was definitely the cost - apart from a few new frames I bought with some birthday money last month at Ikea, these were all frames we had around the house, either from old photo arrangements, or from some ones my mother in law picked up at garage sales this summer after I mentioned we were collecting frames for a gallery wall. Perfect! :)