14 gallons in 1 day
We’ve been gathering apples for the past few weeks, waiting for a cold day to press outside without yellow jackets. And well, the weather has just been too nice lately, no colder days in sight so we went and pressed it all. We did it inside the sugarhouse, space is a little tight but we can close the doors and that was immensely helpful.
Bins and trailers full of apples
Cider making is another area where we are really starting to know what we’re doing. The day was full of hard work but not stressful at all. We know how to avoid yellow jackets, how to set up and use the press proficiently, we brush hogged bellow the apple trees right before the season, picked apples at more frequent intervals. Everything is better prepared and better handled. And the result is 14 gallons of cider in 1 day, for a lot of work but certainly much less work than previous years. Experience is a very nice thing to have.
After washing the apples, we crush them
Then we press them
8 gallons, more in the fridge.
3 friends stopped by and left with cider, and we gave a half gallon to a neighbor. All vaccinated, all outside, feels nice.
The sugarhouse is very multipurpose, Robin is staining shingles while we get the press ready.
Mandalagaba Plots
I’m going through a big plotting batch, including a lot of creations from Mandalagaba. It’s very lucky to have this stream of material to pick from.
Most of the work here from Hava Edelstein, 1 From Lara Laubert and a couple of unknowns.
Fountain pen
I cobbled together a program to cross-hatch colors into various densities based on luminance.
I also finally have a fast SVG to GCode converter, I’ve been after this holy grail for years but always reverted to the super slow yet reliable Inkscape converter. I rewrote a fast one I found which crashed on large SVGs (the whole reason to get a fast one in the first place). It works like a charm after turning certain recursive calls iterative.
This one breaks my brain in the best way possible. It is soothed by the immediate pattern recognition, yet the patterns beak upon further inspection.
From PlottyBot’s preview window
Lara Laubert, another prolific Mandalagaba user, her representations of Nature leave no jaw undropped.
