Fall Rituals and Confessions

I have a few annual fall rituals, some successful, some not so much. One of my successful ones consists of canning jams, fruit butters and spicy ketchup.


I've already done some canning this year, and it's been very, well, fruitful, for lack of a better word. In fact, I canned 12 bottles of apricot butter the first week in August and we only have one left, which kind of defeats the purpose of "laying up in store" and having canned goods in the winter, but it sure was good. We're saving that last jar for Christmas Day or something equally as special. I've also taken a lot of tomatoes from my garden and turned them into delicious spicy ketchup and have canned that also. That's some of John's favorite stuff in the world, and since I have a surplus of tomatoes still, I may make some more this week.

Other successful fall rituals? Well, I've recently gotten a little better at decorating for Halloween.


A couple of years back, I invested in some creepy ghouls, huge spiders with webs, bats, skulls, and I even made a witch wreath. For those of you who know how low my craft level tolerance is, that was quite a feat.

I have some baking rituals as well, that are generally quite successful. For instance, the moment the weather turns cold, I start craving pumpkin tarts and apple cider. I've made several batches of pumpkin tarts this year so far and they've been well received. I owe a couple of readers the recipe so I'll be sure to get that up, along with my apple cider recipe.

Now for the confessional. I have one very unsuccessful fall ritual: quilting. Don't get me wrong, I used to be quite a quilter and I love doing it, but I can't seem to finish a quilt now to save my life. About 10 years ago I started a lovely quilt I named "Fall Leaves". The idea was fantastic: use all my extra material to cut little squares and triangles and form them into fall leaves and combine all the blocks to be a lovely montage of autumn foliage. Here's what a set of 9 blocks looks like:

For some reason, I can't seem to make myself finish this one or a quilt I started for John about 7 years ago, made entirely out of old blue jeans. I even go through the motions of getting out all the quilting materials every year, only to have them clutter the table and then be put away a couple of weeks later. A couple of years ago when the weather turned chilly, John asked me in passing, "Hey, isn't about time for you to get all your quilting stuff out and pretend that you're going to work on it?" That earned him a crusty.

At any rate, I'm not sure why I can't seem to finish these projects. They've been sitting in my sewing closet for years. I have so many quilts in process, and if I'd actually finish them, then I'd probably have a lot more storage space. Maybe by sharing this confessional, I will motivate myself to actually finish at least one of these this year. Then again, maybe not. Only time will tell.