I started making wedding favours in July. Yes, for my June 2011 wedding. We (and by ‘we’ and mean Cinnamum and I – sorry Mr. Cinnamon Buns!) decided on little 125mL jars of homemade jam for favours – Cinnamum is actually making most of them. Mum and dad live on the coast, where it is nice and temperate and wet, so they grow strawberries and raspberries, rhubarb, a smattering of blueberries, and blackberries are considered a weed. Mum is taking care of all the jams except for blueberry and peach – those were left to me because mum is more comfortable with the other berries. Plus, I wanted to at least make a few of the favours! It is important to me to use in-season fruit, so I got right on the blueberry jam, and waited until September to make the peach jam. I bought a 20-lb box of organic peaches at the farmers market, so Cinnamans and I ate a lot of peachy things for a while. Mum has made everything except the strawberry, which she will make with the first strawberry crop of 2011 – her strawberries are best in June, so when we made our decision mid-July, it was a bit late.

I had never had store-bought jam until I moved out of my parents house (and I didn’t move out until I was 21 and had finished university!), and I started canning my own after a year or two of storebought goo. I wouldn’t say mum particularly taught me to make jam, there was no ‘and now we have a jam-making lesson’, but when you grow up with that much canning being done, you sort of learn by osmosis. We had abundant strawberry and raspberry patches, along with a plum tree and multiple apple trees where I grew up, so there was a lot to can.

Some of my previous canning efforts, including my favourite ever: Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam.

This history of canning makes the favours feel especially ‘authentic’ to me. I know Martha Stewart has inspired many people to have jam favours, and I am in no way decrying the brides who learn to can just for favours: I think canning is something everyone should know how to do (along with bake their own bread, but I digress). I just love that we have jam favours, because it is very us. It also gives mum something to do for the wedding – I want to be able to include her, but because she doesn’t live here, we can’t actually do any wedding crafts together.

Photo from the Martha Stewart website

Cinnamum did come to visit for a weekend though, and we found some wonderful fabric at a quilting store (My Sewing Room) that is perfectly drawn prints of….. FRUIT! We bought fabric for each type of jam, so we don’t need to actually put the flavour on the label.

(personal photos)

Mum’s jams on the left, mine on the right.

We are going to use the fabric to cut out circles to elastic or tie to the top of the jam jars. Today, I decided to find out what diameter of circle we will actually need to use. I got out my:

• pinking shears
• scrap fabric
• jam jars!
• a few round dishes
• an orange Sharpie

The orange sharpie was the only thing near to hand that I thought would be easy to see on my scrap fabric. It was that or a charcoal pencil, which I dismissed as being too messy.

First, I tried one of our smaller dinner plates, because that’s what mum and I talked about in the quilting store when we were figuring out how much fabric to buy.

That’s that big mound of fabric in the front. There is a jam jar under there I swear! Then I traced a cereal bowl onto the fabric with orange sharpie and cut it out with pinking shears. Too big still. Little glass bowl was too little, but $0.50 garage sale metal food storage dish was perfect! Here’s a photo with the measurements written on the fabric.

5.75″ it is! I now have just one question… how does one get orange Sharpie off white bowls and glass plates?