My goodness the daylight hours are incredibly short right now.  It’s dark by 5 p.m., which means I’m spending a good amount of time in my favorite chair next to the woodstove and a good lamp crafting.

I did take some time to craft a few things for us, too, this past weekend.  In the early spring (before the start of the craft de-stash), I bought a box of fabric at a church rummage sale for $1.  It was a big box and has provided me with enough fabric to make curtains for our bedroom, 8 placemats, and lots of bits and pieces for various quilts.  Also, in that box was a bit of holiday fabric that I wanted to use for placemats for the Christmas season.  We decorated the house on Saturday and when I pulled out the runner I made last winter, the inspiration to make those holiday placemats finally hit me.

I think they turned out well and the table just looks so very festive.  We don’t do much decorating, but I do enjoy the little bits that we do.

Independence Days Update – Week 30

Plant something: Nada, we are now getting snow on a regular basis (its melting on a regular basis, too, but it’s here for the winter now)

Harvest something: Nothing

Preserve something: I canned up 13 pints of pinto beans – this is more for convenience than preservation sake.  I made Turkey stock from our Thanksgiving turkey carcass.  We used some to make soup and froze about a quart.

Waste Not:  Composting, using the turkey bones for soup and then burning them for additional heat in the wood stove, repaired a sweatshirt of Jeff’s with items from our sewing stash 

Want Not: I bartered a canning class tuition for repair to a crocheted afghan my grandmother had made long ago.

Eat the food: Local turkey, stuffing made from bits & pieces of homemade bread that I’d saved in the freezer, apple pie made from our apples, soup from our veggies, we eat canned or dried fruit almost every day with lunch.

Build community food systems: I’ve scheduled another canning class for the spring semester.