What You'll Get

Hands-on Education - Learn the fundamentals of canning, preserving, and the growing cycles and availability of the fruits grown throughout Colorado's Front Range. Your canning bee experience can take place in your kitchen, or Kathy's. 

Stock your Pantry - Let Kathy guide you through the fruit growing season as you learn to can each of the fruits at their optimal preserving time, leaving you with a pantry full of fresh canned delicious to enjoy throughout the year. 

Description - Work alongside Kathy as you can local peaches, tomatoes, apples and pears. You'll learn first-hand the best practices and techniques for canning, including fruit selection, recipes, ingredients, sterilization, and sealing. 

Available beginning in September: Peaches, Tomatoes. 

Available beginning in October: Apples, Pears. 

Location: Denver, Colorado. 

Cost - $70 per person. Includes all materials, ingredients and use of equipment (jars included). 

Minimum of 2 people per session. Maximum 6. 

We require a $25 deposit to book your experience. The next step is easy: we'll contact you within 24 hours of receiving your deposit to get started.

Thank you for choosing Soulcrafting!

Modern Gingham was started in 2012 after I became obsessed with the idea of preserving foraged fruit.  I had been canning for years-now I have been preserving for 15 years, but at that time it had been about 12.  When I began canning, I had just started my post-doctoral fellowship, after I met the parents of my then boyfriend (and now husband) when we visited them in England. They had an amazing pantry of home-canned goods. And I had an arrogant thought that canning was the most adorable thing I had ever seen, and that I wanted to learn how to do it.  We lived, at the time, in Chicago, and the local fruit from the farmer's market was apples-so I started with apple sauce, and gradually taught myself to pickle vegetables and preserve a wide variety of fruits.  We moved to Montreal in May 2005 and I began over-buying at the farmer's markets and freezing and jarring as much as I could.  

When we moved to Denver, I would go on long walks around Congress Park (my neighborhood) and I saw how many fruit trees went unpicked. The idea for preserving that fruit started, and then...I got lucky- the most miraculous fruit explosion happened that summer. I was able to pick sweet cherries, sour cherries, apricots, peaches (including white peaches), apples, pears, crab apples and plums. I started working with local growers, getting to know local shops, and figuring out how to best capture the taste of the fruit.