Gma's Kitchen ReOrg: Spices

You should have seen Grandma's face light up when I told her I was going to make refillable kitchen containers so that we could buy more things in bulk. I think it made her day! It's the little things...

So, because finishing the downstairs...ish...wasn't enough, I have decided to take on the kitchen we share with Grandma. A part of this is self serving, I cannot fit the things i want to fit into the pantry downstairs until i move kitchen things currently in it upstairs. We plan to be here a while, at least a year, so I'd like to.... i dunno.... use my snazzy kitchen gadgets in the next year. And not break a sweat going up and down all the time. Grandma is ok with it. Commence reorganization!

It's going to have to be in baby steps. There's just too much to take on to simply move things over and make an empty shelf for us. I have to take Grandma's needs into consideration too, and one thing she likes to do is buy in bulk. However, she loses track of things at times. Or buys it simply because it's on sale. 

(Hence the 5 pounds of sugar.)

I want to respect this method (it's not hard, I am all for buying in bulk and getting things cheaper, not to mention wasting less plastic by not buying bottles),  AND also admit that because I am not used to it, I will not be able to manage this all in my head. To accommodate this, I plan to make an inventory list. Before I can do that, I have to figure out what's in the kitchen. Besides 5 pounds of sugar :) 

As I set about this, I found there were multiple bottles of the same thing. Not to mention I have some of the same spices and there is no sense in not combining them. I also have these beautiful blue vitamin bottles that i cleaned up to use for the wedding, just empty and doing nothing. Hmmmmmm... I see spice jars in their future....

I gathered up supplies:

For some reason, my black ink wasn't being very....black....so I used a black fine point sharpie to help it along. Then I set about combining everything, labeling bottles as I filled them with their destinies.

They came out pretty cute! I like the messy typewriter look of the letters. Its the book nerd in me :) My only qualm is that you can see the glue on the bottle, because I was trying to seal off the label. My husband says it makes it look more "rustic."

/eyeroll 

yeah...He's cute when he's trying to keep me from getting all perfectionist. :) I am pretty sure I can sand it down though....

Desk Organizer: Trash to Treasure (with unexpected success)

So I set out to make a desk organizer for my new crafting corner (YAY! crafting! You know, it's the first time I have had all of my arts and crafts stuff in one place before? it's a very exciting moment). So I gathered together some tin cans. They were too uniform in size so I decided to mix in some glass jars. There was too much roundness going on so I took some old stacking blocks and turned them upside-down. Eventually, I got this snazzy configuration:

Now, one thing I would change about what I did next: paint first, then glue. Buuuuuut, in my defense, I was in a hurry. The downstairs has been a disaster for a week longer than I wanted and it's freaking me out. So I was not interested, initially in prettiness. I wanted function and by golly I wanted it now. 

Thus, I glued these pieces to the cardboard, waited for it to dry and then took it out to garage and painted them.

sorry it's dark, the shop has poor lighting.

It looked....better. But not amazing. I wasn't supposed to care though! I wasn't going for amazing! I was going for functional! BUT BUT BUT....it COULD be pretty! Right? How long could it take?

/sigh

Yeah...the internal battle began. My need to have things be pretty started fighting with my need to have immediate usefulness. As I stared at the uniform hammered steel colored organizer, contemplating, the need for pretty...won.

I started to pick at it, put one color here, another there. Decoupaged old pages and fun words. There had been no original vision, so I wasn't expecting much. And...yeah...it's not the best thing I've ever made, but it was unexpectedly cute! I was so excited by this turn of events that I really loved it by the end. 

Isn't it cute?? :) It got a bit of steampunk influence. See, the reason I had to do hammered steel paint is because my white paint up and died! It's a full can, you can feel it, it's not clogged, it just doesn't let the paint out! anyway, since I was in a hurry to make this happen I just grabbed the next best neutral I had. When I started adding color, all we really had was left over paint from our steam punk costumes. It works though :) My living room is burnt orange and neutrals, I like to think it ties it all together. 

I cut the cardboard off the edges to finish it off. And added a penny to the flower :) I just love it, I do!

Plastic bags have eaten me whole!!!

You know, you can only put so many bags aside to use as mini-trash bags liners. Even with my resolve to bring reusable bags to the store, I seem to have an abundance of these things around! They are taking up valuable space, getting in my way, look trashy, etc. Why? Because I used these things for packing up items for storage, and as I unpack two years worth of squirreling, I find myself utterly over run! Except for the occasional biodegradable bag which shatters at the slightest touch... they weren't kidding about that biodegradable part.

/sigh

What's a girl to do? Well, if she's this girl, she can look around and find out some new uses for bags that will give her hope that hanging onto the darn things will be worth it!

Fused Plastic Gift Bags-with tutorial! Found this awesome little tutorial on craftster.org. It's by Lillianpearl and she says it's her first tutorial but I think it looks pretty good! Way to go, lady :) My mom always saves gift bags too (who doesn't) so these things would get used over and over, it's the ultimate new life for ugly plastic bags.

I also thought this was a nice diversion from the more abundant tutorial of making a reusable shopping bag. Not sure how to fuse bags? Etsy's got you covered here.

While you're wrapping, you could use up some more plastic bags making pom-poms to decorate other packages, just like they do over at c.r.a.f.t. (i thought they were pretty cute, not to mention easy to make, always a win.)

I really enjoyed the look of these clutches over at Crafted by Us. These would make cute gifts too, not to mention they're a great way to use up cute bits and pieces of fabric or ribbon etc. that you just can't bear to get rid of because there's enough to do something it's just not a very big something. 

Not that I ever do that.

Quick! Look at the clutch!

And have you seen the tutorials on making iron-on's our of plastic bags? I wanna try this one, I could see this being really, really fun in a collage kinda way! Not to mention it's so personalized.

These get honorable mention for being cool and creative, but lets be honest, I don't have kids. And the light decor idea doesn't fit my needs...because I'm tall and live in a basement. I'd put my eye out. 

• Lampshade Made From Plastic Bags 

• Fused Plastic Bib 

• Fused Plastic Rain Coat