Mother and Daughter Canning and Jamming

In early December, my mother flew out for some much needed mother/daughter bonding. My mother loves to can and during my last Florida visit, I had the opportunity to help her can Better Than Bush's Baked Beans. The canning fun continued with this visit with a few canning projects.

The first project was making a canning quilt for resting the cans during the loading and cooling process. After checking out a number of online video and blog tutorials, we set out to create our own using stash fabrics selected by Mom. The quilt sandwich included four layers: backing, an old towel, layer of cotton batting, and the quilt top which was a print with ~4" flowers, slightly bigger than most canning jars.

Despite some initial concerns about the bulk, quilting through these layers was a total breeze thanks to my Juki sewing machine! The only challenge was cleaning up all the stray bits of trimmed terry towel that kept sprinkling around the studio! Otherwise, it was simply outlining the various motifs of the fabric--you can watch a time lapsed video here.  The denser quilting provides an indent for the cans to rest comfortably.

A small scrap of red Michael Miller's Gingham Play made for the perfect binding for this reversible canning quilt bringing in the gingham accents of the flower print and the red of the cherries on the reverse side. There were mere inches to spare! Phew!

The next canning projects involved canning persimmon jam using persimmons and lemons fresh from our backyard. The last project was making more canning labels to send home for mom's future canning sessions: Beans (thanks to #CarveDecember's Smelly prompt) and Soup Bowls which were carved during my last visit but I didn't have extra sheets of 2" labels to print.

These gifts made for an early Christmas gift that was put to use once Mom returned home and started canning turkey stock and other recipes.

Thanks Mom for a fun visit which included lots more mother/daughter fun including visiting the Oakland Museum of California to visit the Peace IV sculpture, hiking around Los Gatos County Park, playing Rummikub, shopping at FABMO and SCRAP SF, and more!