Natural homemade fruit jelly: Raspberry jelly

What you will need to make natural homemade raspberry jelly:
- 4 kg of raspberries.
- Sugar, amount depends on the amount of juice you get from the raspberries.
- A strainer, make sure it is not metal.

How to make natural homemade Raspberry jelly:
-First cook all four kg of the raspberries, without any water, for about eight minutes. 
- Keep stirring so it doesn't start to burn or stick to the bottom.
- After eight minutes put it into a fine strainer and let the juice drain into a bowl.
- When its all drained weigh the juice and add the same amount of sugar.
- Put the mixture into a pan and cook on low heat while stirring occasionally.
- When it comes to a boil stop stirring and just take the foam off the top while cooking for another 3 minutes.
- While still warm pour the jelly into cleaned dry jars, do not close them until it is completely cooled off.

Before following any of the natural homemade jelly recipes make sure you read the following post which acts as a quick intro to natural jelly making:
Natural homemade fruit jelly: the intro to jelly making 

Natural homemade fruit jelly: Mint jelly

By Midori (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.1 jp (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.1/jp/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

What you will need to make natural homemade mint jelly:
- 1/4 kg mint leaves
- 1 kg of sugar
- 1 apple
- 4 dl of water
- A strainer, make sure it is not metal

How to make natural homemade Mint jelly:
- Clean the mint leaves with a damp cloth and remove the stems
- Peel, and dice the apple.
- Heat up the mint leaves with the 4 dl of water
- Add the sugar and the diced apple to the cooking mint leaves
- Once it has been brought to a boiling point turn the heat down and keep cooking until the mass stiffens
- Strain the mass and store in well cleaned and completely dry glass jars.

Before following any of the natural homemade Jelly recipes make sure you read the following post which acts as a quick intro to natural jelly making:

Natural homemade fruit jelly: the intro to jelly making

Natural homemade fruit jelly: the intro to jelly making

Jelly should be firm, see through, and should retain the color and fragrance of the fruit. 
It is prepared with fruit juice, and you should only use fruit which has enough acidity and pectin (essentially the thing that makes it turn into jelly). I realize that nowadays you can buy all sorts of additives and pectin that will act as firming agents but this is meant for natural jellies without those. 
The fruits that contain pectin are sour apples, nearly ripe raspberries and grapes and they are the easiest ones to make jelly with, you can mix them with other fruits too.
It is generally good to add some lemon juice to any fruit when making jelly because of its acidic properties.
If you want your jelly to look really nice don't peel your fruit or take out the core because they contain the most pectin.
Instead wash the fruit and cook it either whole or just cut up, with just enough water to cover it.

Gifts for the Canner

Cook it on high heat so it would get soft, but be careful not to have it fall apart. 
You should line your strainer with two layers of gauze and leave the fruit in it to drain on its own. Do not press it just let it sit there for a few hours and do its thing.
The juice drained from the fruit should be weight and then added the same amount of sugar, then cooked on low heat. 
In general the jelly is done if you put a drop of it on a plate and it hardens straight away.

There is also raw jelly which can be attained from cherries and from red and black currants.
The fruit should be washed and seeds removed then the juice pressed out. 
The juice should then be warmed up, but not to the boiling point. 
once warmed up turn the heat off an add the same weight in sugar to it. 
Keep stirring it well until the whole thing starts to cool and harden. 
The raw jelly should be done in small quantities.

Halloween Decorations on a Budget

Halloween, like other main holidays, is all
about the big decor, big scare, big fun and all of that can easily
lead to a big hole in your pocket. There are, however, some steps you
can take to make that hole significantly smaller. And don't worry the
fun and all the bang will still be big! The good thing about
Halloween is that its the same theme every year. Scary, it never goes
out of style, so you don't need to worry about whats new each year.
The first thing you need to do is go to the attic, garage, or your
closet see what left over decorations you can salvage. You might be
lucky and have plenty if you are the type that saves, but if not
don't you can still work things out. 

Another great way to decorate for Halloween, or any occasion for that matter, is to do
things like this yourself. Make your own decorations, and why not
after all? That way you can kill two birds with one stone. Get your
decorations taken care of and spend quality time with your kids while
doing some fun crafts, for an example. If you get some Red Rosin
paper, some paints and brushes, glue and scissors you would be
surprised of what you will be able to create. You can paint pumpkins,
evil cats or make lanterns, and trust me it doesn't end there, sky is
the limit.

However, if you get stuck during your arts and
crafts sessions, and there is no help in the last years boxes full of
stuff you can do some spending. Dollar stores and Party stores are
always cheap and have a bunch of nonsense in them. You are bound to
find plenty of stuff without spending a lot of money. Be careful not
to get carried away though, just because everything is a dollar we
get the sense that everything is cheap, which it is but then we
forget about the quantities and get a huge total at the checkout. Pay
attention to how much you buy and what you buy to make sure there are
no embarrassing "oops" at the checkout.

Internet is very wonderful, it is a vast space full of so many things
that you could use. If you do some research, you can find anything
for your holiday needs, from recipes to templates for gift boxes, to
instructions on how to carve pumpkins, instructions on how to make
decorations. There are plenty of pictures and templates and arts and
crafts projects that you can use. There is not as much need anymore
to buy the pricey magazines with the seasonal ideas in them, you can
find all that and more online for free.

Make your own Halloween invitations

Halloween is all about scary, fun and most importantly unique, and seeing as how the invitation is like a first impression of the party you need to come up with something pretty darn cool! Not to worry, here is a relatively easy and headache free way to recreate this fun take on invites. You can make these adult friendly with a bunch of gory details, or more funky and PG rated for children. You can even tweak this for a non scary holiday or a party. What we are doing here is making gravestone party invites, with a dead guy inside keeping a scroll with the invite on it.
What you will need to make your own Halloween party invitations:
This will make only one invite, just multiply the ingredients/supplies with the number of invites you need.
- Rectangular flat candy box, this is easily found at any arts and crafts shop (Joann's or Michael's are a couple of well known ones).
- Tissue paper, pick a color that will fit with your color scheme.
- A sheet of printer paper.
- Cookie dough, for this part you can pick any kind that you like however gingerbread or sugar cookies seem to be the best.
- Gingerbread man cookie cutter.
- White icing, if making a light colored cookie (sugar cookie for instance) get black food coloring on top of the white icing.
- Oil Paints or tempera and whatever goes in hand with paints, brush, water cup, some scrap paper for practice and tissue paper.

How to make your own Halloween party invitations:
- First thing to do is decorate the so called "gravestone", so take the crafts box you bought and paint it to resemble a gravestone. On the front "engrave" the name of the person which you are inviting to your party. Make sure the box is completely painted on all sides. Painting the inside is up to you. If you have time go for it, it will make your invite look more put together.
- For this part you might want to make extras, as it's very hard to resist munching on the cookies! You make your regular gingerbread man cookies, however when you go to decorate them with icing draw skeletons. Creepy or cute, it's up to you.
- The third part of this invitation is, of course a message letting the invitees know that they've been invited. Find a photo of some aged paper online and print it out then rip out small square of it and write an invite with all the info in a black gel pen. Ripping will make it look more in character and older than cutting, the gel pen looks better as well and smudges here and there are OK. You can leave it unfolded or fold it, or even roll it up like a little scroll.
- Once your gravestone is dry line the bottom of the box with crinkled tissue paper, there's no need to over do it, one or two sheets is just fine. Place your cookie skeleton onto it and place the scroll next to it or on top of it. Put the lid on and your invitation is all done! Mail or hand deliver to the recipient.