Crafty-Ass Witch

And I’m afraid I’m starting to become one of them.

Back in ye olden days, when the internet was new and shiny and kids had to get their stupid video downloads from filesharing (because YouTube didn’t exist!), I was pretty active in the knitting community on livejournal. The community, while tons of fun, was beset with n00bs who asked posted questions like “how do I cast on?” or “my circular knitting turned itself inside out in my bag. What will happen now?!” that made a lot of us facepalm regularly. It was so utterly, utterly irritating that I promised myself I wouldn’t ever do this.

Enter my love of canning. For a good long while there, my canning recipes came solely from pickyourown.org (which I highly recommend – very clear, step by step instructions w/ lots of pictures). I got a copy of the Ball book for Christmas, but it took my mother 4 months to send it to me (bless her) and the can jam started in January, so I started relying on the internet for recipes and canning advice. Specifically, twitter. Post a question with #canvolution and Canvolution will probably retweet it. Within minutes, you have a few different people responding with an answer. I did this for my pickled beets when I was trying to figure out water/vinegar ratio for water bath canning. I did this when I was trying to figure out how to decrease the amount of sugar I use in canning without Splenda (answer – you can’t, really. Wah wah).

I’m starting to wonder if by doing this, I’m annoying the pants off of whoever runs the @canvolution twitter feed. While I keep the questions to a quasi -minimum and do a google search before asking, the information found on the internet (blogs, etc…) is often difficult to get a read on. Everyone has an opinion, but there’s rarely a consensus and rarely a USDA based opinion. When asking questions about techniques for knitting cast-ons, doing an improper one isn’t going to possibly give a loved one botulism, yanno? I’m trying to be extra careful, but it’s hard for me to balance the silly questions with the need to knows with whatever.

It boils down to – I want to learn, but I don’t want to piss off the internet. But it’s the internet, so you’ll always piss off someone. Also, I’m kind of insecure and tend to blog about it. Just in case you were wondering. 

Though I still can’t figure out if it’s OK to stack processed jars on top of each other or if I wouldn’t be able to tell if a seal breaks if I do.

(In other news, Doris and Jilly put together this highly awesome FAQ that has really helped me out. I took all of the rings off the jars I put in my pantry after our move. Also, Joel has a really helpful post about using alternate sugars while staying pectin free in jams.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 4:14 pm and is filed under canning, drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.