Friday, November 27, 2009

Countdown - Day One - November 27

I finally finished my containers for the Countdown. I folded 35 paper cranes and cut out little strips of paper with the activity of each day written on it and rolled them into little scrolls wrapped in thread and labeled with a sticky number then threaded through the beaks of each crane so that each crane carried our day to us. Then all of these were strung together in one long strand. I will likely not do this again as it is crazy and time consuming. It is however, quite decorative and the crane as a symbol of peace is nice for this time of year in addition to meaningful to our values. So, there's that.I got the whole thing done just in time.
Hung it up and promptly had to pull off Day 1.
Which read...
Only trouble was it turned out it was too cold to extract honey. My mother has big plans to get a solar panel for the Honeyhut so it can be electrified and heated (and they can have a place to plug in the wax knife and install lighting for days when extracting seeps into night), but alas, none of that is quite in place yet. It's sort of the wrong season for honey extracting I guess. Not that that matters much. The frames can stay in storage for awhile as honey is a natural preservative and doesn't go bad.

We all spent the day recovering from Thanksgiving instead. We watched movies, sat in front of the fire, played around the house, said goodbye to Aunt Teresa, and ate turkey sandwiches. So on Day Two we had two tasks. One of which was extracting honey. Bastian mostly ate it.
As did Aleks.
He also got a chunk of comb to chomp on. Which he did.
The honey wasn't really dripping, so Jim used the wax knife to cut off the comb caps and then had a special tool for scraping the frames free of their waxy whatnot. It worked well enough. He got this plastic sink and set it up to let the honey drip through into a filter.
The bees started swarming about outside the Honeyhut. Several got in. They were after their honey.


4 comments:

Julie said...

I love your cranes & scrolls, very beautiful.

We plan on taking over the hive in our garden next year, so looks like we'll be doing some extracting of our own. Looks a little complicated. We have friends that have a couple spinner extractors that seems to make the process a lot quicker.

anna kiss said...

They have a spinner extractor too. Perhaps I didn't explain well enough. The honey isn't really flowing right now, so the spinning didn't work at all and it had to be scraped. You still have to get the caps off and everything gets really sticky. Just extract in August or beginning of September!

Rachel said...

Geez, Anna, I'm totally impressed with your string of cranes! I was feeling pretty happy that I managed to make the envelopes (stealing your idea from last year about using holiday magazine pages), but they seem pretty homely now, compared with these cranes. :) I am so behind on my blog, owing largely to a period of days when I was offline entirely...so now I feel a bit overwhelmed to try to catch it all up...but I hope to do so soon. Looks like you guys are fully enjoying the season! (We made the marshmallows yesterday, cut them up this morning...it's pretty sticky work! But very pretty in the end.)

anna kiss said...

I'm behind on the blog too. I haven't even photographed Day Four yet. It'll get done this evening - though we still have to do Day Seven's activity. Too much to do! Holiday cards still aren't out either.

Don't feel bad about the cranes. I'm crazy, remember? I once had to help fold 1000 of them for a play I was stage-managing. My friend's mother did most of them. I only actually did about 50 or so. I have never forgotten how to do it though!

The marshmallows are fun! They're best for hot cocoa though. Not so much for roasting. They're a little weird.