Mom's recipe tea towel for Spoonflower!

'Ham Hawaiian' tea towel design at Spoonflower.
©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved.

 This week at Spoonflower… designers were asked to celebrate Mother's Day with a tea towel design featuring a recipe from their mom.

My Mom rocking the
Ham Hawaiian this past Christmas

   The concept came from one of my families favorite dinners. Ham Hawaiian. My design started with many drawings of the ingredients in the recipe… a ham, cherries and pineapple. I also added a serving plate,  bowl, parsley, berries and an egg slice. I wanted to make the presentation something mom could be proud to serve. The drawings were done with black india ink on paper and on my iPad with the Adobe Ideas App.  The images were scanned and added to Photoshop where I colored and arranged the parts into the composition that you see. The design is meant to be hemmed by folding a 1/4" and then folding again to show a finished edge.
Recipes fit a fat quarter of Linen-Cotton Canvas fabric (27" x 18"). Voting starts on Thursday May 1st and continues until May 8th 2014. Please Vote!

Ham Hawaiian detail  ©2014 Patty Rybolt Designs

   Ham Hawaiian, the real story… My Mom presented fabulous holiday meals but to be honest, the day to day dishes were not always winners. She does so many things well, but cooking was not her favorite part of being a mom to eight. We couldn't waste food, so on the rare occasion that there were leftovers Mom would reinvent them into a new dish. After serving a holiday ham much like the one she is pictured with from this past christmas, Mom decided to take what was left (which wasn't much) and dice up the ham in small pieces so it looked like there was more and put a few cans of chunk pineapple on top. She baked this for a very, very long time. When she saw the smoke coming from the oven she declared that dinner was ready… as always when faced with a problem her sense of humor took over. The ham had shriveled up and the pineapple was burned. Undaunted, she presented the smoking dish to the hungry brood at the table with the declaration that we were having 'ham hawaiian'. It didn't matter that dinner was ruined, we all still remember that night as being one of our favorites dinners because she had us all laughing till we cried. This is the legend of ham hawaiian and my fabulous Mom, Claire! #Clairethelegend !!