Many pink things

In our perpetual quest for crafitness, Roomie (hell, let's call her Jenn. She has very little innocence left to protect.) and I decided that canning was the next natural step. I ordered a great book from my book club, and we set out to purchase lots of super fun equipment and produce, and then try not to burn ourselves.
We started out at the Farmers' Market/Flea Market near my mom's on Sunday. Kind of a wash, honestly. We couldn't find any of the produce we really wanted (mostly tomatoes and peppers), so we settled for plants. We acquired pickling cucumbers, and for no good reason, eggplant. It just looked really cool, and since when I say "we are going to grow cucumbers and eggplant", what I really mean is "we are going to talk Yoshi into growing us cucumbers and eggplant", well, you know. I thought it would be interesting for him. I have no idea what to do with canned eggplant. But whatever, it looked good. When they all grow up, we will make dills with fresh dill from our herb garden.
We then hit two different Ace hardware stores for canning tools. We thought that since we were out in the sticks, it wouldn't be so tough to find, but man. We ran all over. We were really hoping to find something at the flea market, but oh well.
Bought some produce at the Albertson's, and then....
We made Strawberry Lemon Marmalade! We did not burn off any appendages!!
Here's Jenn playing in the boiling water after I said "Open the pot, hold the tongs and try to look convincing."

I think she did very well. I am totally convinced.
Skimming foam off of boiling strawberry sugar mess is not as easy as it sounds. I never felt like I got it all, but Jenn was satisfied, and she's pretty obsessive compulsive, so I figured it would be okay.
Ewww. Foam.

Here it is, all processed. Does anyone know why the hot jars seem covered in some powdery stuff when you take them out of the pot and they air dry a second? We figured hard water, but I don't really know. We got brave and rolled the jars around a bit to get the gel you see in the bottom to mix through, and now every jar (20 hours later) is uniform and pinky pinky.

We had extra that we didn't get to can; wouldn't fill up a jar. I ate it on toast for breakfast. It was fucking phenomenal.

And for anyone who can't stand the suspense any longer, here is the Walter Halter. It needs the body finished up, one quick seam and the kid is dressed to kill. It is, in fact, much pinker than it shows here. And if you take the cups before overlapping them onto each other and hold them up to my body, Walter and I have the same sized boobs.