Not much gets past my Charlie. He said, “Hey, Mommy – those flowers are not real! See? They’re made of yarn!” I thought it was a fun idea, and I like how it turned out.
Flowers for You
Materials
About 5 yds worsted weight yarn per flower
H/8 5.00 mm hook
Pipe cleaners
Yarn needle
Directions:
Rnd 1: Ch 6. Sl st in first ch to form a ring. Ch 1, sc inc in each ch around. (12 sc) Join rnd with a sl st.
Rnd 2: *Sk 1 st, make 5 dc in next st, sl st in next st. Repeat from * around, finish off. Weave in all ends.
Roll the end of your pipe cleaner a bit, and poke it through the ring from Round 1. You’re done!
I think it would be fun to use the last few yards of yarn from special skeins to make a flower, and collect the flowers together in a vase. Silk, wool, alpaca, angora and mohair blossoms together in harmony? Beautiful.
You may recall that my last attempt at making jam in the bread maker didn’t set up. (That was some delicious syrup, though!) Now it’s May, and my fridge was overflowing with berries, so I thought it was time to give jam another chance. I could have made more freezer jam, but Greg expressed a strong preference for the taste and texture of the cooked jam, and so I went looking for a better bread machine jam recipe.
And I found it. The key was this little jar:
Pectin! (I know. Obvious right?) Specifically, low – or – no – sugar pectin. When you’re making jam in the bread machine, you have to be careful not to put too much in the bread pan, or you’re going to be cleaning baked-on jam out of the heating elements. The low-sugar pectin allows you to put a lot less sugar in your jam and still have it set up marvelously.
Would you like the recipe?
Bread Machine Jam or Jelly
Ingredients:
1 lb of fruit OR 3 cups of juice (to make jelly – I haven’t tried jelly yet)
3 tbsp low/no-sugar pectin (equal to 1 1-oz box)
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup sugar
Directions:
Wash, hull, and finely chop or smash your fruit. (If using juice just skip this step.)
Add pectin, lemon juice, and sugar; stir together.
Pour mixture into bread pan, place in bread machine and select jam cycle.
When cycle finishes, remove pan from bread maker and allow to cool before pouring into clean containers.
Store jam in the fridge (3 months) or the freezer (12 months).
I made blackberry, then a mix of blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry, and then I made a lot of strawberry jam. Because this recipe uses so much less sugar, the jam is less sweet than “normal.” Some people were startled and not altogether pleased by this. Other people thought the stronger taste of fruit was really nice.
The downside to this recipe is that it only uses one pound of fruit at a time, and (because you add so little sugar) it only makes 2 to 2 1/2 cups of jam each time. That’s not mentioning the fact that each jam cycle takes an hour and you must wash the bread pan in between each batch. By the time I’d finished three batches of jam I was pretty tired, and I decided to go nuts and see if the recipe would double well.
My bread machine has a 2-lb-loaf capacity (so don’t go trying this if yours will only hold one pound) and it worked perfectly. I just doubled the recipe and stuck it in on the jam cycle, and nothing overboiled and the jam still set. So, if you have a larger amount of fruit to go through and you want to do it in the bread maker, you may want to do it two pounds at a time.
