Why Hand Drawn Labels?

I know you were taught not to play with your food. I’m here to help you ‘un-learn’ that silly rule.

The North Fork Valley where I call home is bursting with fresh fruit this year. The abundance was starting to overwhelm me as I was faced with over 20 pounds of fresh cherries in my kitchen with my bike crazy husband gone (biking probably) and my daughter’s attention span about as long as a cherry stem. I had a big job ahead of me.

Friends and family, please skip over this part: With this kind of bounty, I wanted to get started on my holiday gifts early. After all, popping open a jar of  fresh cherry jam in the middle of winter helps anyone who is going crazy eating mealy pale pink tomatoes from the store and suffering from sun deprivation.

As I pitted, mashed, mixed and stirred, my arms aching from picking, feet aching from standing, I was reminded of a good friend’s advice: If you have a job to do, make it fun.

Playdate

Take 15 minutes and join me for a creative play date making hand drawn labels for jams, or whatever else you may want to slap a fun label on.

Download and print this blank label template, pick a quiet spot, grab a cup of tea, a pen and dive in!

Doodle Tip:

Fruit doodles can be made up of circles and lines. The looser you get with your style, the more you relax and let the kid in you play. Don’t worry if it looks like the image at left.

I know. This is so good that you are totally jealous. Well, turns out the point is not the outcome, but the process. Make shapes over and over, play with changing the angle of the stem or the shape of the fruit. Now have fun and decorate them with stripes, spots or swirls.

Hand drawing each label is a great way to practice and play. You can get a sheet of labels from your office supply store, or if you’re using them for jar tops, you can pick them up here (weatherproof or gloss are nice for food packaging).

An alternative is to play with your food in Adobe Illustrator so you can print many copies of the same design.  You can get a free trial version here.

I scanned and plopped my cherry image into Illustrator and added some shapes and color to create my final label.

If you are short on time and want to use my labels, you can purchase the printable stickers from the Cultivate Creativity Shoppe

1. Its ok to play with your food.
2. If you have a lot of work to do, find a way to make it fun!
3. If you can’t make it fun, find something to decorate it with afterwards so that you don’t remember how hard it was and you will be ok doing it again next year when the fruit is in full swing.