Colleen here, still on Long Island while Amy is already in California. Staying at my family manor, where we have lived for the better part of a century, there is a lot of history in every bit of daily life. One thing that we are surrounded by would drive Pinterest pinners mad: Our collection of vintage mason jars and bottles.
I loved these wire-top jars since I was a small child and would go down to the scary bowels of the "dirt room" to look at them. My father told me about how our great grandmother used to use them for her canning. He explained that we could not use them anymore because they do not make the rubber rings anymore and that these do not properly seal like our modern mason jars. Nobody wants botulism.
The antique soda bottles came from various places. They were dug up in the backyard, dredged up while scalloping, or just found in the trash. My favorite is one from Jersey City from the 1870's.
But mason jars in our family are not a thing of the past. We buy a few flats every summer for putting up jelly. This year, my father put up a lot of wineberry and gooseberry jelly. We checked out one of our spots for elderberry and it's looking like a good year for that, too!
We seem to have jars from every decade of the 20th century.
These jars were the most recent to be brought up from the dirt room. I love seeing them in the milk crates because this is just how I remember them.
The jar in the middle here is pretty neat. It has a screw-on ring like modern jars, but instead of a metal lid, it still has a glass one like the wire-top jars.
And this scary place is the "dirt room"--my great grandmother's canning cellar. I will never forget how terrifying it was when I was a child. But I always knew that there would be amazing things hidden in there if I just went inside.
