Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Experimenting with Labels

Posted on January 6, 2013

I picked up a package of oval “print-to-the-edge” labels that Avery makes. I have to say, they worked great with the templates available from their website. Much, much better than the ones I tried last year. I chose a matte, textured finish 2″ x 3 1/3″ sized white label and had a lot of fun trying out different designs. Actually I spent way too much time “playing” with design options, without realizing how much time had passed. A great option for hobby winemakers 🙂
We used these labels for our last two carboys from 2010 (!)… the wine still tastes great, we just never got around to bottling it until the holiday break. We had 6 gallons of a mixed apple and 5 gallons of a light concord wine.

Happy New Year!

Posted on January 1, 2013

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy New Year

filled with peace and joy!

We are looking forward to a “fruitful” year, with additional plots of grapes, fruit trees and elderberry patches and possibly our first real harvest of blackberries and grapes. While we are pouring over seed catalogs and dreaming of Spring, we are also enjoying peaceful winter scenes around our farm.

Fancy Fingerless Gloves

Posted on December 30, 2012September 27, 2019

Seems that I get the sudden urge to knit every year around Christmas time – it becomes an obsession, and there is nothing like the approaching deadline of holiday gift-giving to finish projects. This year, I became fascinated by fingerless gloves. They don’t take too long to complete and it is fun to experiment with more intricate lacy designs. Most of the patterns I used came out of the “One Skein Wonders” book, though I also found patterns in some of my older knitting magazines. Here are some of the gloves I finished in Decembers:

Easy Firestarters for the Woodstove

Posted on December 28, 2012

We’ve tried lots of different ways to start fires, from soaking dried pine cones in hot wax to using a blow torch…but the best way we found to get our wood stove fire going is to make simple fire starters out of old candles and paper towels. We burn a lot of candles, especially during the holidays, and we always save the left-over wax. Come winter time, we melt the wax in a pot on our stove, using a low setting for the burner. When all the wax is melted, we use single sheets of paper towels, which we twist to form sort of a rope, and quickly dip these into the melted wax. We then lay them out to dry on freezer paper (or aluminum foil). Once they are dried, we store them in a bucket or bag until we need them. We still use a blow torch to get a fire going, but the wax soaked paper keeps the flames going for a long time, enough to get the kindling pieces burning.