Strawberry Jam

It's strawberry season yeah! It's one of those things I love about living in Belgaum. We are fairly close to Mahabaleshwar and get loads of fairly inexpensive strawberries! So this year we got about a kilogram to be precise.

They were the tart variety and pretty good for jamming.

Ingredients:-
Strawberry - 1 Kg
Lemon - 1
Sugar - 2 cups

Procedure:-
Wash and cut the strawberries into chunks (we like chunks in the jam).  Put them into a heavy bottom pan. Add sugar and lemon rind and juice. Also keep the lemon and pips in a muslin cloth for added pectin. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Let it simmer for about 30 to 40 mins. Perform the jam test to check if its done.

Got two large bottles out of it. Ensure to sterilize the jars for jamming. For this, wash the jars with soapy water and leave them in an oven for 10 mins at 100C.

Wet Bag

We cloth diaper Adrika. Feels good. She likes it better than disposable diapers and we feel good about doing our bit for the planet. We use Flip from Bum Genius - http://www.flipdiapers.com/products.php
Pardon the slightly archaic picture of my pumpkin. Its kind of cool here and she wears pants all the time, so haven't clicked any recent ones in her cloth diaper!

Unlike disposables it would be a very expensive affair if one tosses the dirty cloth diapers. One could, but you know what I mean. Hence the whole issue of storage of a soiled diaper. This is where a wet bag comes in handy. A wet bag is a cloth bag with a water proof inner lining (generally made of PUL or shower curtain material). The beauty is one can toss even the bag into the washing machine.

Here is the wet bag I made for 'Mon Cherie'. There is a good possibility that she would be cloth diapered as well. Hope this bag holds through.

The tutorial was straightforward - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG8WN7mYr8E
I added a handle to make it easy to hang the bag on a door knob or just to carry it. I think it has many applications, can also store other nick-knacks.

Baby Quilts

Being a mother of a one year old, I have received quite a few baby gifts. I can pile them up into a petite little mountain! Some of the gifts I will cherish and keep forever, like the few handmade one's from my mother and my mother-in-law.  I love handmade goodies. Also I absolutely cherish putting in some thought and effort into any gifts that we have to get. There are two lovely little girls who have been on my mind lately. These quilts are for them of course!

Little doll Diya has already got her's and I hope she is enjoying her new quilt! 

 

These were my very first quilts and believe me it took effort! A lot of hard work and patience. I used double layered flannel as the batting and muslin for the upper and bottom layers.
If ever there is anything more evil in this world than bias binding; I would be greatly surprised. Jokes apart, I got a little smarter on the second one and used a flange instead of binding. The one with the flange has the little pink highlight, looks neat right! Flange was super easy as compared to the traditional bias binding. Oh yes, I was stupid enough to make the entire binding from scratch.

Used a couple of resources -

• http://www.sew4home.com/tips-resources/sewing-tips-tricks/bias-binding-figuring-yardage-cutting-making-attaching
• http://www.seamstobeyouandme.com/2013/05/21/flange-binding/

Also another big big surprise was the amount of Math one needs to do for sewing! Phew! Was totally sucked into square roots and the lot!

Loved sewing these. I put in so much back breaking work - mitered the corners, even hand embroidered the labels!

The second one is for my yet to be born niece - 'Pour Mon Cherie. Stay cozy. Love Rhythm.'