Saturday, August 23, 2014

A Little Tour of my Brain, Part 27 - vintage canning labels.

It is that time of year again, time for canning, pickling and preserving all of that produce from your garden, the fields, and forest. Many people still practice home canning but a generation ago it supplemented home cooked meals and earlier it was the main way of providing enough food to feed the family in the winter.

These two books of gummed paper labels were produced by Eureka Specialties of Scranton Pennsylvania. 


The lettering on each label in this book above is the same; clean, clear, and legible, with a space below the name of the contents to date it. It is the designs around the outside of the labels that are so interesting lifting the canning labels and ultimately the canned food to another level of utilitarian decor.














I will show the rest of the labels from this book of household labels in a later post but for now here are the remaining canning labels that have not been removed from this much used little book.



The labels in this book are much bolder in design than the previous book with no area to write the date on. The date would have been neatly written across the bottom, top or possibly hurriedly scrawled across the entire label, depending on how busy/tidy the cook was.

The scanned labels from each book are about the actual size of the original labels; copy them and use them if you like. Let me know if you use them, not because you have to but because I would love to see them used again. Send me pictures if you like and I'll do a post about the labels on the finished canning.

The canning labels may not seem relevant to the work that I create but they are; I love detail, the little extra details that are added into the sculptures give them depth, a sense of time, and intimacy. It will be interesting to see where these may be used in upcoming sculptures.


This is a close-up of "The Man-in-the-Moon will be having a party" showing the some of the shelving filled with items for everyday living. Go to my Etsy shop to see other photographs of this sculpture.

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