Jelly Making

We are blessed that in our backyard the previous owners planted several concord grape vines.  These serve two purposes;

1. Creating a nice patch of shade under the arbor during the heat of the summer.
2. Grapes for Jelly!

This year with all the hot weather and the rain coming at just the right time, we had a record harvest of over 50 pounds of grapes.

I’ve been jam and jelly making for quite a few years and I (and my friends and family) have been very pleased with the results. One thing I always wanted to improve on was the labels.  Until this year my wonderful wife had to hand write each and every jar.  The other problem was when reusing the jar, the label had to be scraped off.

I was on reading some items on my twitter stream last week when someone (I don’t recall who posted it, if it was you please let me know!) Kelly Hunt in her blog eatlocallondon.com posted a link to local kitchen a food related blog out of New York’s Hudson Valley.  Kaela has a great post on making labels using Microsoft Word.

She advised using labels to put on the lid of the jar.  The first advantage is that the lid is never reused so there are no labels to scrape off glass jars.  The second advantage is some great design ideas.

The first task was to find Avery 2 1/2 inch round labels.  Your would think in a city the size of London this should be an easy task.  Several days later I discovered it wasn’t.  Short of ordering labels in bulk (e.g. several thousand) I was out of luck.  I posted my woes to my twitter stream and Chris McInnis suggested getting a full page label sheet and cutting them down to size. From that suggestion I though about my wife’s scrapbook punches.  She didn’t have the right size, but a trip to Michael’s found me the correct size punch.

I then played around with some designs and come up with one I’m really pleased with.

I’m very pleased with it. I will do a similar label with a different color for the blueberry.  Thanks to everyone else who gave suggestions and advice.

Ignite London

Had a great evening at IgniteLondon.

Ignite is a series of 5 minute talks by people about any topic they are passionate about.  The main catch is that you have 20 slides and they change every 15 seconds out of the speakers control. 

The first Ignite was held in 2006 in Seattle, Washington, and more then 50 other cities have had events.  A great way to get a cross section of idea and build community connections.  The event was standing room only and another one is schedule for October. Well worth coming out to the next one.

Quite a few twitter regulars from the area were at the event and you can review the twitter livestream to get and idea on how the evening went.

Changecamp London

I attended Changecamp London last weekend. I was planning a blog entry on it but someone has done a much better job then I could.

Toronto Pics Posted

We enjoyed 3 days in Toronto last week, doing mostly the tourist thing.  I’ve posted some random photos to the gallery.