my husband says i'm a domestic diva...

and that's really the only opinion that matters, right?

a week ago, matt's mom gave me a huge box of pears from her pear tree. she'd canned as many as she could stand, and was tired of looking at the remainder, so i inherited them. they sat on my dining room table for days before i could decide what to do with them (luckily, they were picked a little green, so they hadn't spoiled.)

i seem to do best with recipes that don't require the fruit to be in any recognizable format at the end. sauces, jams, purees, butters. plain old canned fruit requires cutting skills and some level of attention to detail in the peeling & paring - which i hate. i'd rather hack it all to pieces and then run it through the blender.

so that's what i did. 4 pints of "pear honey" (not really a honey - but a sweet spread), 4 pints of "pear sauce" (like apple sauce, but not), and 1.5 pints of "pear butter" (like apple butter, but not). got them cooked, canned and sealed in about 3 hours. and boy, was i tired. the sauce & butter came out fabulously - oh man, are they tasty (way better than their apple counterparts, if you ask me.) the honey, however, needs to be cooked a little longer. on some other weekend that i'm feeling ambitious, i'll open them up, cook them to more of a jelly than a syrup, and then re-can. at least the hardest part is done already. :)

but i didn't stop there. a few of these yummies will be in christmas gifts, so i wanted them to have a unique, creative label. after some internal debate, and wishing that i owned the label stamp set that Stampin' Up! makes, i came up with my own clever idea:

the leaves are from the Target $1 Spot (a box of about 60? for $1!!). i punched a hole in the end, added an eyelet, just so the leaf wouldn't tear, then cut a 1.25" circle from a striped pattern (from Flair Design's new Autumn Splendor line, the same stuff i used on my big monogram). pasted the patterned circle to an Avery keytag, added a Prima flower and brad, and wrote in the contents & date. i strung the keytag in front of the leaf on some ribbon, and voila! domestic divaness achieved!