When my mother began preparing for hot water bath canning in dozens of half-gallon jars, she was at a loss for a vessel to use. She has a stock pot that would handle approximately 3 jars at once, but she needed something to accommodate more at a time (if she didn't want to spend the rest of the summer laboring over a hot stove!). Check out what she used after the jump:
When a friend said she had just the thing she could borrow, my mom was amused to find that the "thing" was an antique copper wash tub! While the tub has probably seen plenty of hot water baths of another sort in its day, her friend assured her she's used it many times for bulk canning projects and it worked like a charm.
Have you had to come up with creative solutions for canning when you didn't have all of the necessary supplies on hand? Please share your stories below!
Related: How To Make Your Own Canning Equipment (Home Hacks guest post from Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars)
(Images: Hot and Steamy: A Visual Tour of Hot Water Bath Canning, Sondra's Antiques)
Kitchen Before & After: A Cookbook Author Transforms His 1950s Kitchen
Recipe: Ham, Cheddar & Chive Egg Bakes
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Bacsac Bacsquare 04...
Dirty Little Secrets of Tidy Families
Hillary & Michael's Refined Roost
My Mexican friends use small galvanized trash cans with lids (reserved for this purpose, of course) for steaming tamales. I'd think they would work great for canning:
http://trashcansunlimited.com/galvanized_trash_cans.html
Since the cans are not supposed to touch the bottom of the canning vessel, what did you use in place of a canning rack? One recommendation I see a lot is to use a kitchen towel at the bottom of the pot. This looks like a great solution for big canning jobs.
http://operagirlcooks.com
Operagirlcooks, you can tie any extra bands you might have together with a little bit of string and use that as a rack to keep the jars off the bottom of the pot. I've also used a round cooling rack for that purpose
I have a proper canning kettle that I picked up for $1 at a garage sale. When it's not in use for canning, it's usually doing storage duty somewhere else in the house. It makes a great mitten/hat/scarf container near the door in the winter!
psst, Operagirl-
http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/news/note-from-the-management-selflinking-signatures-not-allowed-in-comments-099851
(I do always like your comments though!)
I love that solution! I found a 20-quart canning pot on sale for $15 last year... brought it home and realized I didn't have the room to store it. Now I let my mom keep it most of the year, and bring it back home once or twice to process figs. It barely fits on my stovetop, but I have considered using two burners to remedy that.
My family has stored firewood near the fireplace in one of those for as long as I can remember. I never realized it was a wash tub! Cool.
You can get one of those Bayou Classic turkey fryers too. The pot will hold a bunch of cans, usually comes with a rack for the turkey which keeps the cans off the bottom, and the burner will bring the huge amount of water to a boil in minutes.
As mentioned above, I use my husbands turkey fryer. I set up shop on our patio and get to it -- works like a charm!
We already have HUGE pots for brewing beer, double duty man!