For the holidays each year, I like to make at least one special homemade thing to give to family and friends. I love using this time to make a special crafty project! Last year I made wood burned spoons and now have a serious urge to wood burn every blank wood spoon I ever find... This year I decided to give vanilla extract a try. I had pinned a recipe for this well over a year ago and have been wanting to give it a try ever since. Plus, this was a fun excuse to paint up a little design for the labels.
I used this recipe and these vanilla beans for mine. I found these to be the best value vanilla beans I could find and they came vacuum sealed and super fresh! Sadly, raw vanilla beans smell kind of strong and a little gross in my opinion. I guess I expected to pop open that vacuum sealed package and have sweet sweet extract smell coming from them. I wanted to buy the IndriVanilla beans that Alexandra recommended in her recipe I used because of the raving reviews and quality/price, but they were sold out at the time I tried to order them.
The one thing that I didn't do was make these early enough. You really do need to leave plenty of time for this recipe or you're just going to end up with slightly flavored vodka... This is why I made sure when I gave them to family and friends at the holidays to put an "enjoy after" note on them.
Of course, my favorite part of this project was making the labels. Once I painted out a little design, I printed as many as I could fit on this Avery sticker paper, cut them up, and adhered them to the bottles with a little piece of beautiful Studio Carta classic twine underneath. I used these bottles, which were a fantastic deal and seriously great quality.
