A Slow September Day | Decorating My Home & Making Jam for the Autumn Equinox

Good morning friends. It is a truly crispy and chilly autumnal morning today and although the days are still very warm here in London, it's been so wonderful to wake up with that fresh scent of autumn in the air. It feels like such a relief after the summer. I've also started lighting some candles in the mornings and it truly starts my day off in such a calm and wonderful way. Something about natural light in the mornings allows you to slow down a little and start the day gently. Hello everyone. Good morning. I hope that you're having a lovely week so far and a really nice start to your day. Today it is Tuesday morning and I suppose you guys will see this video when it comes out on the weekend at some point but yeah today it's Tuesday morning and it is a rather gloomy and cloudy morning here in London although it is really really beautiful. I am really enjoying these kind of cloudy mornings right now and the autumn is just ever so slowly starting to come in and settle in and it's just so beautiful. I just love waking up to this kind of more fresh breeze and even if it's cloudy and a bit grey it's kind of moody and so beautiful in that way. I'm really enjoying this right now. I have a day off today from teaching so I thought I would use this time today to make something this week because at the end of this week and into the beginning of next week we are going to be having the autumn equinox basically which is normally celebrated from around the 20th to the 23rd of September. I think it's on the 23rd of September here in the UK and in the northern hemisphere where the day and night are going to be equal lengths so it's a very very magical time. It's a very special time of year, the autumn equinox. It's a very beautiful time when autumn starts to really kind of settle in and all the colours are changing and just so many beautiful changes in nature at this time of year and I just I love this time so so much. I love autumn so much. I've really been looking forward to this time and kind of just celebrating the start of autumn I suppose and this new kind of fresh season. So I thought that today I would take the time and actually make some jam that I have been wanting to make for a couple of weeks now and I've just felt the last few weeks I've felt so so just behind with so many things that I've wanted to do since the summer and coming back to London. There's been so so much to deal with mainly with my school and my work. There's been just so much organisation and things that needed to be kind of taken care of before I could think about any other things. So I have finally got to this place now in mid-September when everything seems to be a lot more settled and kind of things are sorted out and I don't need to think about them anymore so I can really start to enjoy kind of these aspects of autumn which I really really love. So I'm very excited today. This morning start with making some jam and I know that this is normally maybe considered a summer activity or you know perhaps it was for people when they would have an abundance of fruits and berries to collect and to preserve for the autumn and winter and of course I live in a flat here in London as you know. I do not have my own fruits and berries unfortunately but I still want to make the jam because it is such a fun and beautiful way to celebrate the fruits of summer I guess and the berries of summer and celebrate kind of the harvest season. It's called Mabon in the Celtic and Pagan traditions, this autumn equinox, this kind of harvest time of year. There are three kind of main harvests throughout the year, one in the beginning of August and then one in the kind of end of September and one also in October around the end of October. We know it as Halloween or Samhain as it's also called in the Celtic calendar. So this celebration coming up for the autumn equinox, it's the celebration of the harvest of fruits and vegetables and berries so it's a really really beautiful time to make things like jams and celebrate the kind of final fruits of summer and preserve them into the autumn and winter time. So that's what I'm really really excited to do today. So I am going to make strawberry jam today which I absolutely love. Now I also love apricot jam and blueberry jam very very much but I'm going to start with one thing at a time. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll also have time to make the other ones but for today I'm going to start with strawberry jam and see how I go. This is an activity that definitely takes some time so I'm going to get going and if I have more time today I really wanted to make a little autumn decoration which I will share with you hopefully later on. So yeah let's start by making some strawberry jam. Making jam brings me back to old memories of childhood and watching my grandmother make the most incredible rose petal jam back in the Soviet Union. A simple way of connecting with nature, of foraging the gifts of summer and creating something beautiful in time for the bitter cold winter that was to come and although the traditions of eastern European people vary slightly from the ones I feel more drawn to having grown up in England, that feeling has always stayed with me. The desire to stay connected to the seasons and to celebrate all the wonderful gifts that each new season brings and living in a big busy city has inspired me even more to reconnect with myself, with nature and to romanticize the old ways of doing things. To craft, to bake, to preserve and to make. To take the time to relearn the old skills that my grandparents knew, skills that may be passed down through generations. I have realized in the last few years how slowing down and reconnecting with a simpler more old-fashioned way of living has truly changed my city life and allowed me to believe that a slow and beautiful life can be cultivated anywhere you live and for me it all started with falling in love with each season and creating my own small moments of magic. Making a seasonal wreath has been one of my most favorite crafts that I so look forward to at the start of each new season. It's always so exciting to walk out into nature and find new little treasures to forage and every new season brings something completely different. The start of autumn brings us beautiful green ivy, oak leaves and birch twigs. Also many colorful berries like hawthorn and rowan berries. All these little treasures can bring such color and beauty to a home space and I truly think that natural or homemade decorations always add something incredibly special that store-bought ones cannot bring and autumn is a wonderful time to experiment and to decorate your home. Crafting this wreath reminds me of being a young girl running around with flowers in my hair and spending hours imagining tiny fairy worlds and in fact I still do but now as an adult I have decided that it is never too late to craft to dream and to romanticize your life and your home space and that living my city life following the seasons isn't at all silly or frivolous. It makes every single month a time of change and celebration and something to look forward to and this is why I love the time of the autumn equinox. Since ancient times people knew it to be a magical time, a time of great transition, the days getting shorter, the longer nights creeping in, a time of change and slowing down within nature and within ourselves, a time of reflection and preparation for the colder months ahead. There are still so many things to do this autumn to celebrate this magical season and I can't wait to share them with you. I'm so so happy with this wreath. I think it turned out so well. I think it's so, it's just so beautiful to go out into nature and to find little kind of treasures in nature, whatever it may be, leaves, little berries. I've got some oak leaves here, some branches of birch, some birch twigs as well with some leaves and then I've got these little black ones. I'm not sure what they are. I'm gonna have to have a look and some green ones like that as well which haven't yet turned dark brown and I've got these little guys which I'm also very curious about. I just picked them up. I'm not sure what they are as well. I need to find out. They're so, they're so cute, really really beautiful and I've got some rowan berries here. I think the oak leaves are so beautiful and I just think it turned out so well. It's, it's one of my favourite activities each season, as you may well know by now, to craft my own wreath and it just brings me so much joy. It's, it's, you know, it's using what nature has to offer at that moment. It's really appreciating everything that there is around at that time of year and every season of the year nature looks so different. There's such different colours and textures and I just enjoy it so much. I think it's such a beautiful activity to do. You can do this with children as well. They can find and pick their own things for the wreath and put it together. It's just, it's a really beautiful activity and I just think it turned out so, so well and I think it's so beautiful to be able to create your own kind of very basic home decorations that you can, that you can use. And as I've said before, it's one of these kind of moments where I love to take time for myself and just be really present in the moment with what I'm doing. And this is one of my most favourite activities, my most favourite kind of crafting activities, outside of herbal, herbal preparations. And yeah, I'm, I'm super happy with this one. So I'm not sure whether to hang it here, once again, on our little door, on our little balcony door, or whether to hang it outside our front door. So I'll have to have a think. I highly recommend you also try, go outside, do a little foraging, see what you can find, craft yourself a little wreath. I bought the, the wreath itself just in a basic craft shop for about, I think it was two pounds here in the UK, so extremely, extremely inexpensive. I think it's one of the most fun activities and definitely one that I love to do at the coming of each new season. It's a beautiful way to decorate your home. So yeah, very, very pleased with this. And now I think we're going to go and check on my jam, because it's been about 24 hours now since I've taken them out and left them to sit and for the lids to kind of vacuum seal after being in the really hot water. So yeah, it's time to go and check them. Hopefully they are done, which means I can then put them away and well, enjoy them, I suppose, with my sister throughout the colder months, which is the nicest thing to have, to make your own preserves and jams and things so that you can enjoy them later on through the colder months. And yeah, it's just so fun to be able to see what you've made and then to be able to put them away into, into a cupboard and know that you made it yourself. So yeah, going to go check on those now. So a really good test to see if your lids have sealed properly is to take the bands off actually, and then to pick up the jar just with two fingers and just kind of test that the lid is really, really sealed on basically. And of course that it's not, it's not popping either. That's, that's the first test. It shouldn't be popping at all. If it's been properly sealed within the hot water for 10 minutes where it was sitting before, so that should really properly seal the lid. But if a lid is popping or it's come off, that means that you just need to kind of put that jam in your fridge and just try to consume it basically. You shouldn't put it in the cupboard after that because if it's not sealed, it won't be properly preserved for the long term, for the long term. So these jars have all been really well sealed, which is fantastic. And now I'm going to label them with a marker, just with the date when I made them, just so I know. This jam can definitely sit for over, over a year, most likely. It has done so in the past very successfully. Sometimes I give them a Christmas time, quite often actually to my family, especially to my mum and dad, because they just love jam so much, just like me, I guess. So they always really enjoy that. And sometimes to friends as well who like this kind of thing. I'm going to store them in the cupboard without the bands. This is very, very important. Anyone who cans food will be able to tell you this, that you must store them without the bands because if the bands are on and something happens to the lid where the vacuum seal basically fails, you won't know that it's no longer sealed because the band will be on it and you won't be able to see that. So it's actually really important to store them once they're in your cupboard with the bands off. That's kind of it basically. So I'm super happy the jams have been made and it's such, it's such a fun process to make around this time of year. I love doing some kind of preserves or jams around this autumn equinox time. It just feels like such a magical time to use up and kind of celebrate the last fruits and the berries of summer and make them into something really beautiful that you can enjoy later on by yourself or with friends and family as well, make as gifts. So it's just, it's really, really nice to do. I'm going to label them and put them away. And I think as this day is coming to an end, I am probably going to just make a cup of tea and I think say goodbye to all of you for the time being. I'm going to wish you all a really wonderful autumn equinox, whatever it is you may be doing. I hope you have a really beautiful time if you are celebrating. If not, then just maybe go outside and enjoy some nature, enjoy some autumn colors. Everything is just looking so, so beautiful right now, even here in London. I think quite honestly, autumn is my favorite time in London. I think I can pretty much say that for sure. It's London just turns so, so beautiful around autumn time and truly the colors are just stunning. So highly recommend that you get outside as well, do some foraging. You never know what you might find. Maybe you can make a beautiful wreath as well. If you guys make anything, please share it with me. I'll be so happy to see if you've made any creations of your own or if you've made some of the things that I'm making, for which I will leave the recipe down below, of course, as always, either in the description of this video or in the comments, which I do sometimes. If you make anything, tag me, tag me on Instagram. Always really fun to see what you guys are doing. It brings me so, so much joy. So please, yeah, tag me on Instagram because I love for us to all share ideas and things together. It's so, so much fun. So yeah, I think I will say goodbye and end this little vlog here. I've had such a crafting in preparation for the autumn equinox, I suppose. And I hope you all have a really wonderful time, a really wonderful rest of your week. And I can't wait to see you all next week. So sending you so, so much love and see you very soon. Bye guys!