... in the car.

By myself.

If you happen to know me in person you know this is a big deal.

A few hours ago this was a pile of tangled blue wool - now it is a ball of yarn.

This yarn is leftover from a hat I made for my brother last Christmas. Shortly (hours) after I finished the hat Abby discovered the ball of yarn and was able to play with it for, oh, about 30 seconds ...

Both Rob and I took turns trying to gently tease the knot apart. It was impressive. The yarn was originally wound into a centre pull ball and Abby had used all of her instinctual "pull the innards out" abilities to dissect it. We've discovered since then that hand wound balls last (slightly) longer during an encounter with Abby. Eventually we'd both given up on untangling the mess and it had sat in Rob's office for a while and then in my sewing room for another while.

I've been doing some rearranging and rediscovered the pile of blue. It's not really suitable for knitting anymore - between us and Abby the yarn is quite worn and slightly felted in places - but I thought it would make good ties for a quilt. It was going to be easier to store as several little balls so I started working at it again and found myself enjoying the challenge of trying to untangle the mass.

It turns out the trick is to not look for ends. Just unwind different loops from each other and gradually things start to make sense. Instead of several little balls I ended up with one big one - even easier to store. Now I can't wait to unite it with some fabric and batting and create something to keep us warm this winter.

We've been enjoying something new with breakfast this week. I spent Saturday afternoon at my sister's learning how to make jam. I've been wanting to try it for a while but was a bit nervous about the process (and the things that might grow if I did it incorrectly). I've read through the instructions in a variety of books and they are simple but I felt better watching someone else go through the whole thing so I really know how it works.

Jane was great about taking me through the process (those are her hands in the picture). She showed me the different pieces of equipment she had and told me which ones were indispensable and which ones were only sort of useful and where to get all of them. We sterilized the jars and lids - which turned out to be not nearly as involved as I thought it was going to be - and made our jam and then filled the jars and processed them in a hot water canner. It was really a nice simple process and it made the house smell wonderful.

We made Cinnamon-Pear jam from the Bernardin cookbook. We had six cups of pears so we made one and a half times the recipe and ended up with eleven 250 ml jars. It tastes and looks a lot like apple pie filling but the bits of pear taste like pear. It's nice on both toast and pancakes in my opinion though I recommend spreading it very thin because it is also very sweet.  I'm planning to try it out as filling for a rustic tart for brunch on Sunday.