Today as well as still trying to catch-up on all my work, I'm making use of all the lovely pears I picked from the small tree in my garden.

I usually make pear chutney with them, but this year wanted to do something different, so got Googling and found some nice looking pear and ginger jam recipes.

Whilst pondering these it also occured to me that perhaps adding some to gin or vodka would also be a good way to use them up...

So first up I sliced up 2 pears and added 1 of each to bottle of gin and vodka. This seems a very unscientific way of doing this but all the information I could find seemed to back this up. Anything different from this involved adding lots of sugar to make a liqueur, which was tempting, but I always find them too sweet, so stuck with the pure alcohol this time.

I didn't have enough vodka to fill the bottle so had to buy a new one and of course out of all those in the supermarket I plumped for the one with the fancy cut-glass pattern. Annoyingly it seems the label won't come off, but I might bead a band of peyote to cover it instead.

Next up was the jam making. I found lots of recipes online and chose the one which looked easiest, doubling it up to start with, and then I realised I would need to make about 5 times the recipe to use up all the pears- resulting in 30 jars of jam. Now I like jam, but I have no need for 30 jars of it. But fortunately/ unfortunately when I went to place the first batch in the jars I realised there was just too much liquid and no way near enough pear.

Panickedly I chopped up all the rest of the pears and put everything back in some pans to cook.

30 minutes later all seemed a lot better and I had enough cooked fruit and liquid to fill my 24 jars plus about 3 litres of pear, lemon and ginger sugar syrup to do something with, I was tempted to bottle it to add to cocktails in the future but the thought of all that much sugar made me feel ill so down the sink it went.

I love cooking but rarely do it, so this was a real chance for me to have some kitchen fun, and even to finally use the measuring cups I bought two years ago in New York.

The jars are now cooling gently and I have no idea if the jam will set or not. But after peeling, chppping and cooking 12lbs of pears I'm past caring at the moment.

The rest of my day was spent making these beaded beads. Of course I have lots of beading work I need to finish, but I had the urge to work on something new. These are for a magazine project and once again I'm looking to come up with something that a beginner can do and which can be explained in 8 steps. I really enjoy the challenge of these projects as I have to assume no knowledge on the part of the reader and I enjoy coming up with new things that are fun and colourful and a break from the more intesive and time-consuming work I usually do. Once I've made a few more of these I'll turn them into some finished pieces of jewellery and get back to the 'must bead ASAP' work.