This is a jar of my newly labeled orange marmalade.  After making my first-ever batch of orange marmalade, I decided that the finished jars looked a little plain.  I decided that they needed labels.  For many people, making and affixing labels to their canned goods would be a simple and rather artistic chore.  Not me, because this falls in the area of crafts and I am not very good at crafts.  I have tried.

There was one year when I made a real cranberry wreath from a ‘Martha Stewart Living’ magazine article I had read.  It jumped out at me from the pages of the magazine.  I had to have this bright red beauty on my front door for the holidays.  For days, I took real cranberries, inserted toothpicks into each one and then pushed the cranberry spikes into a foam wreath form that I had bought and spray painted red.  It looked pretty, but Martha did not tell me that for those of us who lived in California at the time, that real cranberries would quickly rot in the high temperatures that Californian’s enjoy at Christmas.  Within a week, my wreath had a bad smell and the squishy and wrinkled cranberries were falling off their toothpicks onto my front porch floor.  As well, pushing sharp-edged toothpicks into hundreds of cranberries messed my fingers up for a good week or two.  It was painful every time I jammed my two sensitive fingers into my computer keyboard after being mini-stabbed by toothpicks a hundred times or so.

Then there are the times I decide to make hand-made Christmas cards to impress my friends and family (and make them green with envy).  The last time this urge hit me was when a friend of mine convinced me to buy some stamps, card stock and ink from her new ‘Stamping Up’ business.  I bought like $700 of stuff that guaranteed me beautiful hand-made gems.  My stamps were three penguins with Santa hats and scarves on and each one held a candy cane and a string of Christmas lights.  Each one was stamped in black on white card stock and special markers had been purchased to color those penguins in with various colors.  Sounds easy, right?  Not for me.  After I realized that the date to mail the cards was two days away and I was only half done with the number of cards I needed to send, there were two all-nighters needed to finish.  There is nothing worse than coloring your festive penguins at 4 AM in the morning.  This was the last time I sent cards out.  Too much work!

Being wiser with age, I found a website that produces gorgeous writing papers and envelopes called Felix Doolittle.  This company makes canning labels available in the Summer months.  Perfect for me!  Even better, they had a label with oranges on it and I had them add ‘Acorns On Glen’ across the top.  My blog’s first product although they are not for sale so probably not a product at all.  The best part of getting the labels?  I decided that it made me crafty for the first time in my life without having a breakdown or a mess on my hands.  I like this new way of crafting.  I might have to keep it up.  What things have you accomplished in the crafts department?