After my jam disaster of the other day I ordered extra pectin and today set about trying to salvage all my hard work. A bit of boiling, juicing and ladelling later and I appear to have 22 jars (down from 24 even though I added extra liquid- weird) of potential pear, ginger and lemon jam.

Whilst re-doing all this I took the opportunity to taste some and wow. It was sweet with a warm ginger kick and a zing of lemon. I'm hoping this will be good spread on hot buttered toast for the winter mornings. Warm and tasty with that kick in the smell and taste to get your tastebuds and body going. Plus it should also be good eaten with blue cheese or even with something like deep-fried brie or camembert. The slight acidity of the jam will cut through the grease and molten cheese giving it an extra special touch. We usually eat this on Christmas day with gooseberry jam but this year I might insist on using the pear jam. Seeing as that's what I'm planning on giving everyone for Christmas there should be a few jars hanging around!

I learnt some important lessons through making the jam and messing up so badly, and annoyingly it's knowledge I always try to spread when I'm teaching beadwork so I have no excuse for failing so badly.

I always say the best way to learn, bead what you want, stop making mistakes, create new things etc is by simply paying attention and thinking about what you're doing and making.

Looking at your work as you go will help you immediately spot any errors. This means you can deal with them straight away and get on with what you want to do faster. How many times have you beaded something only to spot a looped thread or incorrect bead rows and rows back? It's so annoying and always happens to me when I stop paying attention. Whether I make mistakes more when I'm not concentrating and looking I don't know, but I do know that I don't deal with them immediately when not beading mindfully. This means I have to spend the time undoing and re-doing all because I wasn't turning and looking at my work as I went.

Before starting a project I always recommend reading through all the instructions and beading it in your mind. This way anything you don't understand will leap out and you can figure it out then and there rather than make assumptions as you go on, which always turn out to be wrong in my case.

But never blindly follow instructions. Always visualise before you start what it is you're making and constantly examine your work to see if it fits this image. I have seen people make the craziest mistakes simply because they were so focused on putting one bead in at a time. They didn't take the time to mentally take a step back, look at their work and think 'Is that how a necklace would actually work?'. I've seen clasps put on in the middle of necklaces, rings made which would fit the wrist of a rhinocerous, lids for a vessel in completely the wrong size. All of which wouldn't have happened if people were considering what it was they were making. I'll let you figure out which of those mistakes were mine...

All these simple and essential tips I forgot when making the jam.

Had I paid more attention to the instructions, and ingredients list, I might have twigged that the recipe wasn't even for jam. It said 'pear and ginger preserve' but meant 'preserved pears and ginger'. I'm not a big jam maker so the cups of water didn't stand out to me as incorrect (much as a materials list for a ring saying 50g of size 11s might not immediately ring alarm bells to a beginner beader). But the fact that the pears were described as 'chopped small' in the ingredients list and then as 'quartered' at the end of the recipe should have stopped me in my tracks.

If I had read it all before hand, and I mean actually read it and visualised it rather than just scim read it as I did, this would have leapt out as an inconsistency and at least made me wonder. I may have carried on but perhaps it would have made me look at other recipes for comparison and I could have seen what was wrong with it.

My other fault was not paying attention as I made it. I simply carried on chopping pears and adding them to the vast quantity of sugar water all the while not actually thinking the obvious thoughts of 'That seems a lot of liquid for jam' or 'Hmm, wonder if all that liquid will set'.

Again I'm not a jam expert, but I had heard of tests to see if your jam will set. Did it occur to me to try this? Nope. I put my full faith in the recipe and didn't take that mental step back to thing if what I was making matched up to what I expect the jam to be. Had I done so I could have dealt with it that night and not had the added time, expense and stress of doing it all again. You can bet tonight I made sure to do the test!

Oh well, lesson learnt and fingers crossed I now have jam.

Update- I do have jam!