Lazy Days with Paints

After school was over today, I had an inspiration to paint a little something. Painting is so relaxing. When I was in college, my medium of choice was oils, but that is hard to do at home, with the smell and gross clean up involved. I've actually been building my skills with watercolors and pen and ink. Earlier this year, we got some great DVDs for watercolor painting basics from an artist named Bobbi Dubins who produced these herself. You can find out more about them here. Anyway, we popped in the "First Full Watercolor Painting" DVD, watched it again, and painted a very nice picture each. Mine was of my lovely grape arbor outside. It was raining, so painting outside was a bit impractical today, so I used memory and photographs.

Speaking of grapes, my garden is just crazy this summer. The grapes grew so well, and are loaded down with fruits, but the rest of the garden is sot of a flop this year. I think it was just too hot. A lot of people who bought my book, Growing Your Groceries wrote to tell me that their annual veggies didn't do so well. Well, mine either! LOL Bother, huh?

I am debating as to what to do with all of these grapes. I have 4 bushels of concord grapes. That would be way too much jelly. We like grape juice but last yer some of my juice bottles blew their lids (literally) and turned into a fermented product that I added to the compost! Oy! I am going to try again this year, but I have really been focused more on giving it away as much as possible, and eating fresh grapes too of course, before I spend hours juicing grapes.

One year we made a concord grape pie. I had never heard of one until a blog reader (on my old blog) shared the recipe with me. However, having to peel 4 cups of grapes was an adventure. I started off doing it, but then the kids asked to help. I showed them to pinch the end opposite the stem, and squeeze to get the grape flesh out of the skin. That task soon turned into a grape fight, and "accidentally" shooting each other with grapes, and an ant feast from the stickiness. The pie was pretty good though, especially with whipped cream.

Another year, we decided that the fastest way to juice the grapes was to actually stomp them with our feet as you often see in movies. This was actually and idea that one of the kids had. We used an old, sanitized kid's swimming pool, and we washed all feet well (LOL), and did it. Then I realized it would be rather hard to strain, so I had to scoop it all out, one cup at a time, and strain it. We actually did get pretty good grape juice that year, but it was rather hard to manage, and no one is willing to have purple feet for a week again.

I was googling and saw this really cool grape and cider press, and maybe I can pursude my husband to build one for me....hummmmmmmmmmm