Christmas Mincemeat
Every Christmas I make mincemeat. Normally I make about 10 jars and give most of them away to friends and family. This year, I felt like being a little bit extra. I have been learning how to use the Adobe Suite of software this year. Mainly Illustrator and Premiere Pro. So I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to work on my Illustrator skills (or lack thereof!) and make fancy labels for my jars!
First the mincemeat recipe! I always use a Delia recipe, which has never failed me. The quantity perfectly fits 10 mini jars from Lakeland. They are 8oz jars, and Kilner does some nice ones as well. Conveniently, each mini jars holds enough mincemeat to make 12 mince pies (made in a standard fairy cake tin). It takes a weekend to make. I prep the ingredients on Saturday evening and leave them overnight, then Sunday the bowl is in the oven for a few hours. So make sure you factor in enough time!
I wanted to create a label for the top of the jar with a Christmassy version of my Flamingo Logo.
After a bit of fiddling with adding text in a circle, the label for the lid was complete. The wrap-around label for the jar was much more complicated, as I wanted to add fairy lights and a mince pie recipe. So I decided to use InDesign. Several frustrating hours later (spread over a few days) and quite a bit of googling, I came up with this.
Now I had to work out how to print and then cut them out. I could just use scissors, but we’ve recently bought a Cricut Maker at school and I knew it had a print and cut feature. After quite a bit of trial and error, I worked out how to print out a PDF of my design and send it to cut on the Cricut.
It worked very well, although I do need to work on the bleed at the edges of the design (the circular labels didn’t fair as well).
The finished jars look very professional and the jar tops, with my logo, look amazing! Now that I have the basic template it should be much faster to make labels again next year.
I’ve been learning how to make vlogs using Adobe Premiere Pro. I plan to show what I’ve been doing here on the blog.
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Little Life Update
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I finally caught COVID, and while I am curled up on my sofa feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would check through things. I realised that I haven’t written anything on this blog for ages (gulp April 2021) and so much has happened! The problem is that Instagram is so much quicker and easier […]
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Alison Glass Lumen Quilt
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In which I attempt to make a giant quilt, for the first time!
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Cactus Embroidery – Slow Sewing
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It’s taken just over a year, but this embroidery is finally finished!
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It's new year's day and I'm making Mushroom Ragu.
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Preparing for Christmas
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How I used the school's Cricut machine to make custom stickers for Christmas wrapping.