Five Friday Finds :: Great Canning Resources

If you would like to start canning, but don't know where to start, here are five excellent places to look for inspiration. Before long, you might be hooked and preserving all the bounty you can get!

1. A friend who cans. Canners love to share their knowledge, and having someone walk you through your first recipe can bolster your confidence enough to venture out on your own. Ask around and see if you have a friend who would be willing to help you get started or loan you some of their equipment.
2. Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving (a great first step) or  Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving (for more info, recipes and methods). After a friend initiated me into the ways of canning on my own, without my mom, this was the next step. These books will show you the ropes, help define different terms—headspace? When to start timing a water bath processing? Fingertip tight? Adjusting for altitude? These books have you covered. And once you have the terminology mastered, canning is just like following any other recipe.
3. Your local Cooperative Extension office. A fantastic resource for what's going on locally and most offer pressure canner testing, to put your mind at ease before venturing into pressure canning by making sure you're equipment is working well.
4. Fresh Preserving. Another canning primer, a vast recipe database (searchable by all sort of different factors), troubleshooting, pectin calculator and more. 
5. Food in Jars. Especially Beginning Water Bath Canning and Canning 101, which has answers to all sorts of questions. Marisa includes lots of new, unique and fresh ideas when it comes to canning recipes and products.

Basement Refresh

Object: Spend as little $ as possible.


I'm so excited to share our basement with you! After 10 months of nothing on the walls I used Deid and Chris's visit as motivation to change that. Nothing like a deadline to get things accomplished! We had worked hard to brighten up this part of the house. It started out like this:

For reals. Scary city.

We textured and painted over the paneling, but after it was done I wasn't in love with my paint choice (Valspar Azure Snow). I was going for a bluish-grey, but it felt a little baby boy-ish to me once it was on the walls. Honestly, there was no way I was going to repaint and it was either a happy accident, or just wasn't a bad pick to begin with. Cause it turned out looking good in the end with the pops of color on it.
 
I had planned to make a large gallery wall on the end, and painted all of my black frames white to use. Only after they were painted did I realize a gallery wall wasn't going to work. But I did have a lot of white frames to work with. So we hung 2 shelves we had kicking around from our apartment days and I pulled pieces from the depths of the craft room to create this:

And I love how bright and cheery it turned out! The little room on the right is the toy room, and the toys naturally overflow into this part of the house. I guess we could call this the play room. And these colors are very conducive to play, but I think it still looks like adults could hang out here too.


I don't know what it says about me that I had most of this stuff tucked away (although I did print off a couple of the prints here at home) but it was so fun to be able to decorate with what I already had. There are benefits to never throwing things away.

Sources:

Family Subway Art, by me

I Love Us

Pink frame Poppy Seed Projects

Framed Silhouettes, by me

What I Love About My Home

Good Day for a Walk

We Can Do Hard Things, by me

She Art, by me

Bird from the dollar store and painted pink

Chalkboard tray, a gift from my mom

Sources:

Art in the pink frame was the back of a card 

Paper mache pig from Michael's and painted green

S from Poppy Seed Projects

Love is Spoken Here

Picture of Old Main, by me

Stars are from Pier 1, received as a gift years ago

I did pick up 2 frames at the thrift store for a dollar each, bringing my total for this wall to $2!

We still need to add more pillows to the day bed and work on the other end of the room, but for now I'm declaring this space a success!

Houseguests

Nik,

Well, visitors just left, but the sheets are washed and the bed made up again for our third batch of visitors this summer. With some friends leaving this evening and his parents getting in tonight, the husband asked, "Are we going to wash the sheets for my parents?"

Since we offer nothing but the finest air mattress accommodations, we totally washed the sheets. Classy, aren't we?

Mom and Dad always make it seem like a special occasion when we come home. I love Mom's fresh flowers in the bedrooms and Dad's folding the toilet paper ends into a point.

We've got some treats stocked, water bottles and clean sheets. I think I'll go clip some flowers for the spare room. Do you have any other little thoughtful touches that make house guests feel welcome? Or am I your only house guests and I'm good enough at making myself at home that you don't have to worry? In that case, any touches that say, "Next time, stay with the other sister?" :)

Don't let the beach go to your head. This is [probably] your last one for the summer...
Deid

File This Under Clever

Hey Nik,

I don't think you beat me to pinning this with your fancy iPhone, but I know we both were struck with a big light bulb moment when we saw this in Nauvoo.

 

Putting all the drips from a beverage dispenser to good use! And when doing it on our scale (much, much smaller), using a pretty little dispenser would complete the scene.  Though those gorgeous mounds of flowers are hard to compete with.

Enjoy those cool mountain nights for me. I'll be savoring the excessive heat watch (for basically the whole week) we've got going on here in the mid-west.

Deid

2011 Design Trends

That's right, JoAnn's Special is doling out trend advice! Don't worry, I didn't come up with them on my own (that would be a little frightening!) A few weeks ago I went to Day of Design. My favorite classes were the interior design ones. The cute girls from Opal Never Shouts taught one of the classes, and the other was taught by an interior design instructor at BATC.

Here are my notes from the Design Trends 2011 class. The teacher kept reminding us to not feel like we had to redo our entire house and get overwhelmed, but just to find 1 or 2 new trends we wanted to incorporate and go from there.


 
1. Color Trends
Honeysuckle is the Pantone color of the year. You can learn more about Honeysuckle, a courageous, confident, and brave new color. She described it as a hot pink with red undertones, which created quite a frightening visual image. Fortunately, honeysuckle is much softer than what I had pictured.  I think it would be fun to trade out the orange in my front room for honeysuckle. Bet my boys would love that. 





2. Layering patterns. 
This bedding is from Anthropologie and has great texture. You don't have to keep the texture monochromatic either. I asked what the secret is behind getting, what look like random colors in a room to all work together without having it end up looking all mod podge. She said the secret is to start with a color palette of colors you like together and then as you find pillows, or throws, or rugs in those colors on different shopping trips they will all come together in a room and work nicely together. Like this room on Young House Love.










3. Paper Your Walls
This isn't your grandmother's wallpaper. Wallpaper companies have changed the adhesives and even the thickness of the paper, to make for an easier removal. And these wallpapers have huge print. Like patterns that used to be only 3" wide have been blown up to 1.5' wide.





  
4. Current Ancestral
Also hot is ancestral shaped furniture (think antique) with updated fabric, like this sofa and the chair above. Either my mom is way ahead of her time, or this trend has come full circle because she's been working on updating 2 "ancestral" chairs for a while now. Maybe I should find some velvety fabric and take over the project.

5. Lighting For Art
Light fixtures are going big and making a statement.  You'll also see big fixtures grouped together over tables. Image from Pinterest.













 



6. Headboards
Supersized upholstered headboards. This is one of my favorite trends. Perhaps 2011 will be the year we get a headboard! I think the nailheads add a good balance of masculine to a femine shape here.













 
7. Animal Prints
They can either be print and colorful prints or very subtle. This is a trend I thought had been around for a while, but I guess it is still hanging around.

















8. In the Details
Some of those details are:

Drum stools
Ruffles
Turned Spindles
Rugs
Grouping
Tufting
Clear Acrylic Furniture
Long Oversized Sofas

As well as mixing old and new.
Grey, white and bleached wood (Restoration Hardware has a lot of this going on)







9. Patterns From Nature
This reminded me of Put A Bird On It. But nature is so much more than birds!















So what do you think, do you love or hate these trends? Will you be adding honeysuckle to your home and wardrobe? I'm really liking the texture thing and the current ancestral furniture. I wonder what I can find at DI to DIY with...