Holiday Sewing and Jam Production

As promised, I've gathered pictures of a few quilted items that I made before Christmas. Two sets of items are just too hard to get photos - darn my propensity to forget the happy snaps!!

First up, I made my Mum a table runner from the lovely striped fabric from Hettie's Patch, and then from the scraps I was able to make up two spiderweb mats:

This is the mat I made for Amy's boyfriend's Mum, and I made another one too for my Mum's bestie, but I neglected to take a picture of that one :-/

And here is the runner for my Mum:

Please excuse the hurried and badly lit picture - I grabbed this as Mum, Amy and I were heading out for a Costco/Ikea shopping adventure!

I also made two spiderweb placemats in red and green reproduction fabrics - one each for my two hairdressers. Yes friends, it takes a village to keep me looking this fabulous :-) But of course I didn't remember to take a picture of them either!

But with the scraps, I then put together a few candle mats for my sweet quilting besties that came for lunch on the Friday before Christmas:

There was another one spare, and I quickly bound that and presented it to Shay when she came over to help with the Gingerbread adventures!

I'm thinking that's all the pre-Christmas quilting that I managed to get done, and I'm sure it's plenty!

Today I've been busy making Apricot Jam. This year our tree was kind enough to wait for a few days after Christmas to begin ripening, so I've been able to work at leisure a little more than usual. I've had so many friends over the last few days, all helping themselves to the lovely apricots - I've picked a bunch of them myself, and the tree is still groaning:

Jam is easy to make, and so far I've only used 3kgs of fruit for our jam - I'll make more tomorrow I'm thinking, and probably give lots away.

I just love that jam funnel in the picture there - it's one of the handiest tools I've ever purchased - saves so much mess! I always sterilise more jars than I'll need - it's a drama to race to find more jars if I run out.

And here are the results of my work for this afternoon. I'm just loving the cute Masons jars I found at a local discount store. There will be more of these in my future, and I'm going to put all my other old glass jars in the recycle bin. I'm finding the cellophane lids just aren't keeping the jam as fresh as they could.

There is still a decent amount of jam from last year left over - another thing on the agenda tomorrow is to make some Apricot Jam Muffins - they are really tasty and DH loves them. When I have an opportunity I'll share the recipe. I think they would be great to use up any kind of jam.

Alrighty, that's it for today - it's time to make dinner. I'll check back in really soon xox