Monday, November 30, 2009

Covered Jelly Jar

Here is a fun and easy project for jazzing up your homemade jars of jam and jelly for Christmas gift-giving! At Practical Scrappers, they will be sharing a new Christmas project EVERY DAY, so be sure to visit often so that you don't miss all of the amazing things that will be shared there until Christmas!

We went to a local apple orchard in August and came home with a huge bag of Gala apples. I made apple butter and cinnamon-apple jelly and I thought that they would make super gifts for my neighbors this year. So, I decided to make some fabric jar covers to turn them in to festive gifts!
For this project I used a piece of fabric from my fabric stash basket and some ball-edge trim. I bought a yard of the trim, because it was only $.45 a yard.
I used a saucer to trace a circle onto the fabric. I just used an ink pen to trace with. Then, I cut the circle out and sewed on the trim. I did not turn the edges down on the fabric. I guess it would have made the back side look cleaner if I did that, but I am hoping that no one will turn this over and inspect it and say, "Wow. She should have finished this side by turning the edges under!" lol It honestly looks just fine with the edges raw and the trim covers it up anyway on the front side, and that's what's most important!
I did use one of my special feet for my sewing machine to sew the trim on. It is open on one side so that the balls on the trim had room to go by as I sewed. I didn't use any pins or anything.....I just sewed a long very slowly and adjusted the trim on top of the fabric as I sewed a long. I think that this kind of trim was the easiest, because it was easy to make the sharp curve of the circle with out bunching up or anything like that. So, I would pick out a trim that is very flexible for this project.
Here's the finished fabric piece! You can see a bit of the red fabric showing through the top in this photo. I took some sharp scissors to trim that off as close to the stitching as I could.
Now for the fun part! The circle that fits in the lid....... ;-) I traced around the outside of the metal lid onto red card stock and then used my circle cutter to cut a circle just a little bit smaller than what I had traced. This way I know it will fit inside of the lid. Then, I made another circle but out of white, watercolor paper. I made this circle so that it is about 1/8-1/4 inch smaller than the inside circle of the metal lid. I stamped the image in a chocolate-brown and colored it in with a blender pen and my Stampin' Up! markers and then I sponged red ink around the edges of the circle. I then centered the fabric circle on top of the jar, placed the red circle of card stock inside the lid and then screwed the lid ontop of the jar. Next I adhered the white circle in the center of the jar lid. I wrapped some green, gross-grain ribbon around the lid and adhered it together with some glue. I folded the ribbon over so that I was able to create a small loop of ribbon to hang the tag off of.
For the tag, I cut a rectangle from red card stock and wrote "Apple Butter - made with Honey" on one side of the card stock. Next I cut a piece of green, gross-grain ribbon, attached one end to the tag, slipped the other end through the loop on the lid and then adhered that end to the tag, so that the tag is now attached to the jar. I punched out a big snowflake and added it to the side. Then I punched a small circle, stamped the stocking on it and colored it in and then went around the edge with red ink on a sponge and placed it on top of the snowflake.

And there you have it! A cute and festive jar of preserves! I hope that all of my directions made sense. If you have any questions, please ask! And also please share if you make some of these, because I sure would love to see you're creations!


1 comment:

Sandi Clarkson said...

This is just adorable. Thanks for such great instructions!