I love my spice rack!

I got the idea for my spice rack from this lovely post.

Here is what I started with:

I've had this arrangement throughout my whole student life, 7 years in total, because it was easy to transport, and pull out of the cupboard to find the spices I needed. But a pile of jars that don't match and have the labels hidden doesn't make it easy to find anything! 

I'd seen some cheap jars in Tesco, too bad they contained a "food" that can't really be called food, and I was rather embarrassed walking up to the till with 16 jars of this horrible stuff. Actually, embarrassed is an understatement!

Everything about it. The look, the texture, the smell, the ingredients, was DISGUSTING. I'm glad I saved someone from eating something a cat would turn it's nose up at. 

But then I did buy 16 jars of the stuff, and I probably increased the demand for the things 10x. I hope not. 

I started by emptying all the jars, straight into food waste, and soaking them in water to remove the labels:

I then sterilised them in the oven at 150C for about 30 minutes. 

These jars were the perfect size, and the perfect price for my small budget. At 32p a jar, the embarrassment of buying 16 and the smell from emptying them was worth it to have the spice rack that I've wanted for so long. 

Next it was time to make labels. I made temporary labels that can be removed because I wasn't certain that I'd always have the same spices. I wanted these but I was reluctant to spend money, and making your own is always more fun. 

I cut out some rectangles from white and black card:

 
And then wrote the name of the spice in green (herbs), red (spicy spices), and brown (other spices e.g. cinnamon). Excuse the blurry picture next!

I then wrapped them in sticky back film, to protect them from dirt and water. I attached the labels to the jars with blu tack, because I couldn't think of another option. 


That's enough writing, time for before and after pictures! 

The spices are so easy to find, easy to see, and easy to see when we need more. We buy our spices from a brilliant shop called Scoopaway and you can buy just the right quantity by the scoop, and it's about a 1/3rd of the price of buying them at the supermarket!! 

Plus, spices lose their flavour if you don't use them much, so before, that might have meant buying a whole jar, even if you only want 1 teaspoon! So, this new solution is working very well indeed, because we can buy as little as we need for our recipes! 

It was great to get inspiration to turn a simple food jar into a place to keep my spices. These are perfectly functional, and I still like the labels. They're easy to identify, and I've arranged my spices in colour order! :) 

I want/need your help now though! I want to do something to the lids of these jars. I don't really mind them at the moment, but I tried making one of them silver, and it really didn't work. In the absence of money for spray paint and the consideration for food safety, I don't really know what to do with the lids?


Ideas people, I need ideas! Let me know in the comments!

Quick post: Easiest, cheapest kitchen roll holder

I thought of this as I was walking to the park! 

You will need:

Kitchen roll, some twine or string, and a thinner cardboard tube (optional really). That's it!





Then decide where you want to put it - you need two points to attach your twine to. Attach one end: 




I live in a rented flat so I can't put nails or hooks anywhere (but you could of course). Luckily, there was a tiny gap between the shelf and the wall, so I threaded the twine through with a needle, and made a knot in it so it wouldn't fall down. 


Next, put your thinner cardboard tube onto the string. It will help the kitchen roll move more freely. I tried it without, and it's still ok (in case you don't have a thinner tube spare -I think mine came from a roll of baking parchment, cut to size). 

Then add the kitchen roll and attach the twine to the second point. Attach it in a way that allows you to easily remove it, when you need to change the roll. 

I did this:




I wrapped it round the shelf and tied a little knot in it. But not too tight so I can get it off when I need to change the roll. 

And voila, my new kitchen roll holder! For the cost of pennies!

One less thing that lives on the kitchen counter!

I'll share a post on the spice jars soon. I'm really happy with how this turned out! 

What thrifty things have you been doing? 

Thrifty little storage boxes

You know the piles of stuff that gather around the house, especially on the surfaces?  Dining table or kitchen counter perhaps? These are most frequently paper in my flat. Mail, junk mail, notebooks, receipts, you name it.  

As Laura says on her blog, here and here, piles of stuff occur either when stuff doesn't have a home, or in the landing zones - the places we put stuff when we come in the house.   

I have one such pile in particular; receipts, because I just don't know where to put them.  I need them to keep a budget of what we spend, but I'm not the type to enter a single expense into the spreadsheet every time I buy something. This means that I need somewhere to keep the receipts in the meantime! I think the pile of receipts has the tendency to be moved around the room because I don't have a fixed place for them.....

UNTIL NOW! :) 

My ethos is to reuse wherever possible (read more about my ethos here).  I put a sturdy but small cardboard box from my hairdryer in the recycling, because I couldn't think of a use for it (after all I'm also trying to declutter my flat!). I managed to rescue it from impending recycling lorry death just in time when I thought of what I could use it for: little boxes to store receipts and other small items.  Yay :)

This is the box I started with:

I wanted it chopped in half so I could have two smaller boxes, so I drew a line around the centre:

And then cut along the line with a craft knife and scissors (you could use just one)

 

I found some cute (FREE) scrapbooking papers to print out, here (they come as pdf's). Another place for free papers is here.

I used some card to spread my PVA glue onto the box. A glue stick would be fine too (and perhaps better to stop the paper getting soggy)

I covered the box in white paper first to help hide the picture of my hairdryer.  I cut it diagonally to make it easier to fold over the edge.

Then I cut the scrapbook paper to size and folded it over the edge too. I left the red sides because I quite liked the colour, but it does leave the edges a bit untidy. 

I covered the second small box in a different scrapbook paper and went all the way round this time, because the hairdryer image was on this half.

Then onto LABELS!! Fun labels are great because you know exactly what is supposed to be in the box! 

I made these labels with Ribbet. You can use this tutorial here to read how to make labels in Picnik (which got shut down and replaced).  Everything in Ribbet is identical to Picnik except the background/logo and the name. 

I printed out the labels and stuck them on with a glue stick.

The boxes are done!

I named the other box "stickies" because it has all my post-its, adhesive labels, and stickers in it, i.e. anything that sticks!  I like it. 

Before and after shot:

My life will be that little bit more organised now I have a fixed place for my receipts! Small steps! 

Anyone else been coming up with thrifty storage solutions?

I'm linking up to:

Quick post: Quick sink solution

Just after I moved in, I discovered that there was no real place for the scourer/sponge to go (I hate it when it ends up in the sink!!!)

 

So I took an empty yoghurt pot and cut it up to fit around the tap, as a little holder:

This took all of five minutes, and it's working well! 

 My inspiration for this came from this post for a holder while a phone is charging (so clever), and there is a slightly more elaborate tutorial here for doing this with a shampoo bottle.  I must admit theirs is prettier than mine! 

You could do this with any plastic container that is big enough to hold a sponge or brush when it has been cut.  Again, perfect recycling and repurposing! :D 

-Linda

Hello blogworld

I've decided to give blogland a whirl.  The main purpose of this blog is to keep a record of my projects - which happen when inspiration strikes me - anytime! I am open to and love all the different materials out there, and LOVE learning new techniques.  The internet is pretty awesome for inspiration these days, with all the inhabitants of blogland and Pinterest of course!

It started with knitting, then moved onto crochet, patchwork, re-upholstery, finger-knitting, applique (haven't tried it yet), and I'm sure there are plenty more where those came from.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about and figuring out what I enjoy doing, and from that I've developed my "ethos":

Re-use something if possible, re-purpose, recycle.  This means acquiring materials from charity shops, scrapstores and the like.  When I visit a fabric shop the first stop is the remnants bin.  Some would call it "make-do and mend".  If I have to buy new fabric, just because, erm.... I'm incredibly impatient, I will only look at the "reduced to clear" section.  Quilting cotton can cost anything up to £20 per metre, and jeez I don't think I could justify spending that much on a bit of cotton fabric, just out of principle. 

Here is a picture of a basket I made from simple brown packing paper, and when that ran out, I pulled out some coloured paper to jazz it up a bit:

 The tutorial for these baskets can be found here.

 I have lots more projects in progress or that I want to get started on - watch this space! 

-Linda