Canning List Freebie!

Having a master list of all your canning accomplishments for the year can be handy in keeping track of your consumption habits, and while a notebook list is practical, why not have something a little...stylish? 

The Official Bird Hears Bear Canning Inventory Sheet, 2012 Edition
Download the .pdf from Google Docs.

Put 'em up!

Hello, dear readers!

How was your summer? We are on the cusp of Fall, hands-down my favorite season. I anticipate trips to Greenbluff for apples(and, oh my, apple doughnuts!), cider, much knitting...heaven.

While I am head over heels in love with the autumn months, this summer has been good to me. And thanks to my generous mother and the pressure canner she gifted me with last winter, I can keep some of this summer sunshine deep into the snowy days.

Mr. Bear and I, along with my lovely friend Desiree, attended the first weekend of Greenbluff's Peach Festival a couple months back. We came home with an entire bushel of peaches! 50lbs of summer goodness! Around 200 peaches! I split this splurge in two groups; half a bushel of yellow freestone Elegant Lady peaches, and half a bushel of white freestone Sugar Lady peaches. Thus began the Great Week of Canning.

With Desiree and Mr. Bear's help, we managed to can all of the peaches, minus a few we ate fresh because, c'mon, fresh peaches. At the end of the week, our shelves bore the weight of:

3qts Halved Peaches in Light Syrup
7 half-pints and 5 quarter-pints White Peach Salsa
4 half-pints Peach Butter

2 1/2 pints Peach Syrup
2qts 4oz Peach-Lavender Lemonade Concentrate
5 half-pints and 4oz Peach Jam
2 1/2 pints Peach Jelly

7oz Peach Fruit Leather

We were exhausted, but accomplished! Some of the recipes I used called for what I feel was too much sugar, so I will probably be reducing the amount of sugar in similar recipes here on out. I want to taste peaches, not peach-flavored jolly ranchers!

You know what goes amazingly well with homemade peach jelly? Home-baked bread!

I recently replaced my bread pans and cookie sheets with some new ceramic-coated pans. They are magic! Nothing sticks to them, and they're a cinch to clean up afterwards. I'm in love!
The bread recipe I used is from The Daily Dish, and it is wonderful! Much better than any sandwich bread I've ever purchased at the store. I baked these two days ago, and Mr. Bear has already polished off a whole loaf!

Cheating on my Camera

 Mr. Bear and I have incredibly generous friends and family in our lives, and received everything on our honeymoon registry, except a new camera. Which is fine, I'm totally not complaining about that. We have all the camping equipment we wanted, and then some, and we have awesome hotels booked(and a yurt!) and money for great restaurants and souvenirs. It's going to be the most amazing three-part honeymoon ever, and we are incredibly excited for it.

It's just that my poor little Kodak EasyShare that I've had for three years has been all over the world with me and it's taken some knocks. It's also now quite eclipsed by newer cameras. I'm saving up for the NEX-5n, but I've been feeling rather down about not having a nicer camera to take on the honeymoon to capture all of our awesome moments with. Mr. Bear, wonderful man that he is, borrowed a Nikon D40x for me to use on the honeymoon, and brought it home so I could learn it before we leave next week. I adore my new husband.

I'm already in love with this camera, it takes such better pictures than my old one. I've only been shooting around the homestead, but I plan on taking it out this week and seeing what it can do.

Rainbow Bling

One of the side-effects of being in a burlesque troupe is having buckets and buckets of rhinestones laying about. I had wanted to have this necklace finished in time to give to Jewels before the Pride Parade, but sadly life got in the way and I'm only finishing it now. As you can see in my inspiration picture above, the necklace that inspired this one is also rainbow-themed, but I wanted to take it in an over-the-top direction more suited to Jewels' style.

[Edited 6/23 to add] Of course, if you'd prefer to just buy a pretty necklace like the inspiration necklace, you can find them at SparkleBeastDesigns on Etsy!(thanks to the Offbeat Home community for locating the source of the inspiration necklace!)

For this project, you will need:

Sheer fabric(I used .77/yard tulle from Hobby Lobby)
Rhinestones(also from Hobby Lobby)
Glue Gun and Glue Sticks
Ribbon

I also used a quilting hoop to stretch the tulle out on, but this isn't strictly necessary.
First, lay out your design. I began with the outline in large clear stones, and then filled it in with rainbow gems.

I began gluing my design by beginning with the center-line. I glued the bottom center jewels first, and worked my way up.

Then I began branching out on the upper edge.

If you accidentally glue something in the wrong spot, don't freak out! Just hold the hot tip of the glue gun against the back. This will reheat the glue and the jewel can be lifted and repositioned.

I completed the outline by adding the lower edge and the drop jewels on the bottom.

I then took my large rainbow jewels and placed them first, trying to space them more or less evenly.

I began filling in the smaller rainbow jewels. It's okay if they don't fit exactly like they did when you planned it out, just fill in where ever you can.

Add any accent jewels you like. Voila! Our design is now backed by sheer fabric.



Carefully cut the design out, giving it a wide margin on the fabric. Here you can just barely make out the outline of the tulle, like a halo around the rhinestones.

Go back and carefully trim close to the edge of the upper outline, leaving a tab of tulle on each corner, but just skim the bottom edge of the lower accent jewels since they're sort of floating.

Here is what the back of the piece looks like. You might think that looks awfully scratchy to wear. You'd be right. So we're going to cut out some small bits of felt to glue to the backs of the larger jewels.

Here's what it'll look like backed with felt. I have sensitive skin and found it to still be somewhat itchy. Next time I would use a sheer organza instead of tulle and back it with soft flannel instead of felt. But if you don't have sensitive skin, this may not be an issue for you.

The last step is to cut your ribbon and sew it to the ends of your necklace, where we left those tulle "tabs" when we were trimming.

It is now ready to wear. When worn on the skin, the tulle disappears into the background, making the necklace appear as though it is hovering on your skin, like an "illusion" necklace without the wire.

It can also be worn lower, as a decorative neckline on a tank or blouse, though light tulle will show up against darker fabric.

Some other things you can do with your new accessory:

Be the world's most bedazzled stage-coach robber!

Attend a costume party as a blingin' garden gnome!

Have the shiniest headscarf ever!

Give your pooch a Lady Gaga cape!

This "Ice Cream" is Bananas!!!

Can you spell "ice cream"?
B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

In today's Pinterest Challenge, I took on the banana "ice cream" recipe. Mr. Bear's favorite treat is ice cream, and since he recently developed lactose intolerance we've been looking for a substitute. Both Tofutti Cuties and Rice Dream have met with disapproval, so I thought I'd give this a shot.

The recipe I used as my inspiration is the Ultimage Vegan Ice Cream from (never home)maker.

For my version, you will need:

A blender
3 ripe bananas

1 tsp vanilla

1 Tbs chocolate syrup
3 Tbs peanut butter.

Really, you can add anything to taste, these are just estimates.

First, slice the bananas into thin rounds, then toss in a freezer bag and freeze several hours or overnight(I did overnight). Then, add your frozen bananas to the blender and process. I first used the "crushed ice" option until I felt it was fine enough to use the puree option. The blender is slower than a food processor, so be patient. I repeatedly had to stop and squish my frozen banana down with a spatula. It looked about like this(please excuse the poor pictures, I used my 1st generation iPhone):

...and was the consistency of frozen yogurt. At this point I added my peanut butter, vanilla, and chocolate syrup. After a few more minutes of pureeing and squishing back down, it finally became soft enough for the blades of the blender to pull the mixture down itself, which you can see in the lovely pinwheel pattern here:

Since I felt it was mixed and smooth enough for me and Mr. Bear, I ceased processing and transferred the mixture to a 3-cup Gladware container:

As you can see, it only filled about three-quarters of the container, so if you were aiming to make a lot of banana ice cream, you'd need quite a few more bananas. Now, if you prefer the soft-serve consistency, the ice cream is ready to eat now. However, I put the container in the freezer to set up to a more traditional ice cream consistency. After about 4-5 hours, it was ready! I scooped it all into a bowl and shared it with Mr. Bear, who loved it!

Success! Next time I will add crushed Oreos and see if I can replicate his favorite cookies n' cream ice cream.

Shilling on the blog...

Quinn over at Reformation Acres turned me on to Swagbucks. Basically, instead of using Google to search, you search through their engine, and you can answer surveys and stuff, and earn "swagbucks" which can then be redeemed for things like Amazon giftcards, or even cash through PayPal. Quinn used hers to get a pair of really pretty galoshes for the farm:

...and more recently a new camera lens.

I was pretty skeptical, but I actually have enough Swagbucks now for a $10 Amazon gift card after about a week of surveys in my spare time and regular internet browsing. I'm saving up for the $50(or in my wildest of dreams, the $100) Amazon gift card or PayPal deposit to put toward my and Mr. Bear's Honeymoon fund. Honestly, if you spend any amount of time on the internet, just installing the Swagbucks toolbar to do your normal searching is worth it. Even if you never look at their surveys or anything, you get 1 swagbuck per day just for opening your browser window, and after a year, that's $20 for free. What with the economy and job market, twenty bucks is twenty bucks.

So why am I talking about this on the blog? Because if you join Swagbucks through this page, I earn more. Yes, it's a stupid referral scheme and I'm embarrassed for even asking, but money is tight, and I'm not above crowdfunding like this. If you earn swagbucks, I earn swagbucks, so help a blogger out?

Pinterest Challenge: DIY Circus Marquee Letters

For our wedding, Mr. Bear and I decided on a vintage circus/carnival feel. I set to gathering inspiration on Pinterest, and stumbled across this tutorial on Ruffled:

We used much of the same materials: 2 sheets of foam board, 2 sheets of poster board, metallic spray paint(ours was gold), red spray paint, hot glue, and string lights.

Here's how ours came out:

The font I chose was Big Top. The extra flourishes made it a bit more challenging to cut out, but since the letters have walls, you can't really tell where any of the rough spots are.

We used round string lights from Target($13 per string of 25), and spray painted the inside of the walls metallic gold to really reflect the warm light of the bulbs.And here's how it looked on the big day:

They are now gracing the walls of our home, which is becoming more and more circus/carnivale-y awesome by the moment! Hurrah!