Summer is always a busy time, but when the garden starts to produce and is ready to harvest, things can get a little crazy. Its time to pick, clean, prep, and can the colorful veggies. You are probably asking yourself right now, what in the world does having a garden have to do with card-making? So glad you asked 🙂
When it comes time to take all the produce from your garden and prepare it for canning, so you can enjoy them all winter long, it is important to have the right tools – just like in card-making, it is important to have the right tools to make the experience enjoyable. When canning certain veggies, like green beans, you need a pressure canner in order to get the temperature up to a high enough level to kill any bacteria – I only had a large pot for canning – not the right tool. This year, I realized, with all the green beans we were blessed with, we needed a new tool for the job.
When shopping for a new pressure canner, it reminded me how similar canning is to card-making – it is important to have the right tools when making a card. The nice thing about card-making is you can make beautiful cards with just stamps, ink, and paper (SIP Cards). Just like canning, I can store beautiful tomatoes and jalapenos with the water-bath pot; however, if I want to get fancy and have green beans, I needed to get the pressure canner.
Canning and cards are similar in another way – at the end of the process, you have something to show for all your efforts that is beautiful to keep or share with others. When you make a beautiful card and send it off to someone, how much they will enjoy receiving a card made especially for them. I’m part of a card swap and we send cards based on a theme each month and I just love opening up the cards and seeing what each demonstrator created. In canning, it has been a joy to share produce from the garden and it will be just as fun to take a Jar filled with tomatoes and put a card with a recipe and give as a gift.
Whatever you might choose to make, I hope you will spend some time in the next couple weeks being creative – in the kitchen or in your craft room. I find them both to be very rewarding not only for the creator but for those around us!