Hot Peppers! - Ring of Fire

This year I wanted to make pepper jelly again, only hotter. In the pepper bed, I grew only Marconi peppers for the sweet pepper part of the jelly and grew Jalapenos and a new one I never tried before called Ring of Fire. I was originally thinking of making the jelly using all of peppers grown this year. That was the idea until I tried the Ring of Fire.
Ring of Fire is definitely one of the hottest peppers I've grown. I grew a few Habaneros in a pot, which are also pictured above, and thought they were hot, but these turned out hotter. They are a long thin Cayenne style pepper with not much juice in them so I dried them instead. I cut the first batch up with bare hands which was a mistake because I couldn't get all the oil off my fingers, even when scrubbed them with lots of soap, which I found out when I accidentally touched my eye. Since they are a very productive pepper, I had more to dry, but wore latex gloves when cutting them up.
Once dried, these peppers were ground using a grinder dedicated to just peppers. The powder is a bright. toxic orange. About 1/4 teaspoon can well season an entire pot of chili.
I ended up using all the Marconi and Jalpeno pepper juice for the jelly, but only added about a pinch of the Ring of Fire pepper powder to each jelly batch, which proved to be plenty hot.

Burgundy Woolly Acorn Earrings for sale

Since selling directly off this blog has worked well so far, I'm going to offer a few more things.

These little burgundy wool earrings are made using felted wool and real red oak acorn caps, along with brass beads and findings.


The wool is needle felted from corridale wool and then wet felted to create a very firm, dense and smooth little acorn.
The ear wires are Vintaj natural brass and are nickel free.

The entire earring is about 1 7/8 inches long, from top of ear wire to bottom of the dangle. The ear wires pictured are 1 inch from top to end of back curve and the dangle is 1 1/4 inch from top to bottom.

There are four different styles of ear wires available. One is a nickel free brass colored lever back and the other three are Vintaj nickel free brass.


These earrings, as well as all my jewelery, come packaged in a brand new jewelry box tied up with ribbon to keep it safe in its travels.

Burgundy Woolly Acorn Earrings
$14.00 includes shipping in the USA

Ear Hook Type

large hook small hook lever back

A rare occurance - Morning Rainbow

We rarely get early morning rainbows. Usually the rainbows come in the afternoon, when most showers happen, when the sun is in the west and the rainbow in the east. But at 8:00 this morning, the sun was shining brightly in the east and the rain was coming in from the west, making a beautiful, full, double rainbow over the mountains in the west. I couldn't fit the entire rainbow in the camera lens, so I got as much as I could. It lookd like the clouds obscured most of the mountains:

My Fuzzy Nuts: Woolly Felt Acorn Earrings

It's been while since I posted a new blog entry, but now it's time I do something about that. Once of the things I've been keeping busy with is making lots of felted acorn earrings out of wool. Nice soft light weight fuzzy earrings. I started making them last year and put a few on my Etsy shop. This year I'll be selling them at the local handweaver's guild sale as well, and I think I'll put a few up on this blog too.
The nut is made of wool that is needle felted and then wet felted to create a very firm, dense and smooth little acorn. Usually the wool is Merino but sometimes Corriedale is used. Sometimes the nut is hand felted and then died using a good, light fast commercial protein fiber dye and sometimes it's felted from pre-dyed wool.
The caps used are oak acorn caps and vary from red oak,


to white oak:


to fuzzy burr oak caps:



The metal parts are brass and the ear wires are either Vintaj natural nickel free brass french ear wires in small or large, or nickel free brass lever backs.