Sundays are for Busy

It's a typical fall day in Vermont - cold and rainy, wet and miserable.
So Madman and I played indoors instead of outside.
Today was the day for straining off the gooshy fruit from the elderberry wine.
We sacrificed an ugly pillowcase to the cause.
We used it to line another 5gallon bucket, dumped in the elderberry goosh, and tied it up.


Then we hung it high:
It took a little adjusting to get the string length just right. Too long, and the bag dipped into the surface of the wine. Too short, and the corners of the pillowcase stuck out and dripped on the outside of the bucket. (Note to self: next time sew the corners to box up the bottom of the pillowcase. No corners = no problem.)
It was fun for the next few hours, listening to the dripping. At times it was playing a merry little tune that made us both smile.
We dragged out a glass carboy that held a long neglected batch of Apple Ginger Honey Mead that I had made a zillion or so years ago, that we thought had failed. We figured we'd dump it so we could use the carboy for our new efforts.

But it looks good... And it smells good (not so listerine-y as it did when it was younger.) As an experiment, Madman put a fresh airlock on it and actually got a bubble.
Scratch the plan to dump it. We might re-pitch yeast, add a little more honey, and give it another shot. Or, if the jostling around re-activated what yeast was in there, we might just go ahead and bottle it...
We used our only remaining carboy to rack the elderberry when the dripping stopped.


But soon, we'll be needing something to put this in:


It's a combination of blackberries and our own concord grapes. It smells divine. Madman's turning into quite the winemaker.

In between all that alcoholic goodness, I used up some apples to make a nice apple gallette:
And there's currently a loaf of bread baking. I think we have the best-smelling kitchen in Vermont today.

And in knitting news,
There actually is knitting news. (Hey, look! I remembered how!) I finished this hat. Just have to tuck in the ends and block it, then it goes in the For-Christmas-Gifts pile.
And I have a lovely failed swatch. Wicked Good Stepmother wants a scarf made from the gray and black alpaca. I found a stitch pattern I loved in Barbara Walker's The Craft of Multi-Color Knitting and cast on.
Too wide. And too loose. So I'm going to eliminate a repeat, and go down a needle size. I love ripping out failed swatches. Truly I do...