I was fortunate enough to have two bridal showers thrown for me recently by my fantastic family and family-to-be. The first, in February, was hosted by my almost sister-in-law and almost grandmother-in-law. Sadly, I didn’t take any photos at this lovely brunch shower. The second, on the first Saturday of March, was hosted by my sisters with help from my mom. That shower had a canning theme. A canning theme! You probably don’t have any idea how happy this made me as I haven’t written about last summer’s canning obsession at length yet.

My sisters both did a great job with the canning theme. The canning jar shaped invitations were made using a printable template found online. One of my sisters made a huge batch of homemade Meyer lemon curd in tiny 4 ounce jars. She also forced daffodil and lily of the valley plants in large Ball jars. Both the lemon curd and the flowers were given away as favors. My other sister baked mini apple pies in the 4 ounce jars and did a lot of decorating at her house with daffodils (my wedding flowers), canning jars and other similar items. They also made all sorts of other delicious foods including Virginia ham biscuits, lemon bars and deviled eggs (made with sweet pickle relish I canned last summer).

If you’re interested in the printable invitation templates, a blog post about them can be found at Cottage Industrialist (and I think my sisters found the invitations via Pinterest). Also, if you want to make your own homemade Meyer lemon curd (and trust me, you do want to make your own), I’m pretty sure that my sister used the recipe found at Food in Jars.

I was lucky enough to receive a few canning-related gifts as well. Among the items I received: a beautiful tea towel and 2 produce bags from Etsy seller Oh, Little Rabbit and my own copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. I checked this out from the library repeatedly last summer, so it was time to get my own copy.

If you’d like to see more pictures from the shower, visit my Flickr set.