Friday, September 26, 2008

Jelly!

Today we made grape jelly, although the grapes were not from our garden they were from a friend of ours -- her dogs were eating the grapes and she wasn't using them for anything, so we asked if we could take them and she said yes. Now we had two bags full of small, fresh, organic grapes, and since we couldn't eat all of them and allready had plans to make at least some of them into jelly, we decided to make some grape jelly! It was the best jelly I have ever had! Even if it was a little bit too sweet by my standards...
Here is a picture of this wonderful, blended, boiled, strained and spectacular jelly! Although I can't give you a taste of how good the jelly is, I can share a deliciously pretty picture of the finished jelly!

Thursday, September 25, 2008

What do you do with a couple of overgrown zucchinis?

Here's the answer:
carve statues out of them!

This is one of the stone heads from easter island as best as I could make it:























This is the famous statue "The Thinker" carved out of zucchini as well as I could carve it:


So much to talk about!

There's so much to talk about on a new blog!
I'll start with pets: we have a dog named Sunny who was found wandering around in LA, and found by a freind of ours who E-mailed the photo of her to us and our first response was "That's our dog!"


















We also have 4 chickens.
This is Sybill, no, she's not half turkey, she's a chicken, although she is a turken.
















This is Madame Maxime, (our chickens names are from Harry Potter), a buff orpington, so she should get bigger then the rest of the chickens, but not yet.





















This is Minerva. Our chickens should start laying soon, but none has yet, hopefully we will not be too late to find the eggs either, because when your chickens have full range of the yard you never know when they might lay their first egg, or where!



















This is our lap chicken Ginny, well she isn't now that she's grown up, but when she was a chick, the only way you could get her to fall asleep was holding her, and if you weren't in the same room as her, she'd peep until you picked her up!























We also have some pet rats, this is Emile, named after Emile the rat in Ratatouilli

















This is Remy, Emile's sister, even though Remy and Emile are brothers in the Ratatouilli movie





















This is one of our three fish, Bluey the beta. I could only get pictures of two fish, though, our algae-eater is very shy.


















This is our blackskirt tetra that lives with Bluey and Mr. Sucky ( our algae- eater)





















And, last but not least, except in size, one of my two grasshopper pets, my brother has two also, so this represents all four grasshoppers, they all look alike anyway, except for one of mine, his name is One-Leg, and you can guess why he looks different.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Sewing

Today I decided to sew a shirt, and I did. One thing I like about being unschooled is usually, if you want to do something you get it done! :)
I've also been interested in skinning and leatherworking, but today I've been working with cloth.
The red shirt I sewed didn't fit me perfectly (it was a bit snug) so I gave it to my 6- (almost 7-) year-old brother, who's been wearing it ever since (although I just made it this evening.)
I'll put up pictures of it soon!
I'm also planning on embroidering it, too, once Harry (my brother) decides what he wants on it! :)