Check the Label

Hers.

With a new pantry (check that out here if you haven’t seen it yet), comes the chance to do one of my favorite tasks.  Let’s say it together: re-org-a-nize.  Ah, the thought brings joy to my heart.

Have I mentioned that I L-O-V-E Pinterest?  Hm, thought so.  Well, I picked up this great storage idea from The Painted Hive which not only looked great but it was relatively inexpensive to replicate.

I followed her advice and picked up a few SLOM jars from IKEA: one 17 oz, two 34 oz, two 61 oz, and one bottle with stopper for a grand total of $24 pre-tax.  Not too shabby.

 

   

The Painted Hive’s guide involves using magic decal coating paper which she sources from an Australian company and it was a little pricey (try $14.90 for three sheets)… yikes!  It sounds like a great material but we weren’t ready to invest in the jars for that much just yet.  We decided to use regular clear sticker paper instead and just kept in mind that we wouldn’t be able to run the jars through the dishwasher as the ink would probably come off.  I’m pretty much a hand washing pro though, so I wasn’t too phased.

We found Avery clear, decal paper for $13.60.  For 10 number of sheets, the price wasn’t too bad and now I have a supply of sticker paper on-hand for the next random project that arises (with Pinterest, I’m sure it won’t be too long).

What I liked best about The Painted Hive’s tutorial was the label design she created.  I wanted to create a few additional food item labels and use a slightly different font (more of a typewriter look), so I decided to create my own labels.

Based on food we store, I decided to recreate The Painted Hive’s brown sugar and flour labels, create slightly altered powdered sugar and granulated sugar labels, and then created new labels for oatmeal and olive oil.  Feel free to download the PDF of the labels below for your own food storage jars!  Download here.

And guess who I suckered in to applying the stickers?  🙂

His.

Alright, I don’t know what it is about women, but they’re obsessed with storage. I don’t just mean a place to store things, but I mean how everything has to be cute and stylish in some way. It’s not enough to put something in a box or on a shelf behind a door; no, everything has to have some clever storage solution, and quite honestly it drives me nuts.

So I catch Julie fawning over something on Pinterest and foolishly asked, “What’s that?” I hardly blinked before Julie threw my keys at me and shouted that we were going to IKEA. Um, OK, but she refused to tell me what for (which is a sure sign that it’s something that will require a lot of work… on my part). We finally get about halfway through the “Help Yourself” section (or whatever it’s called) when Julie points off in the distance and yells, “JARS!” At this point, I was a bit confused, as I had jars at home. No, apparently these were special jars. They had a few different kinds which were all either $4 or $6. Initially, Julie picked out all $6 jars, but I convinced her to pick a few of the $4 variety, including a bottle I promised would hold olive oil (an idea that made her eyes light up almost as brightly as the day I proposed).

We then scurried off to Office Depot in search of a transparent adhesive paper to make the labels, but all we could find was translucent, which gave the labels a “frosted” look which was decent, but not quite what we were looking for (which I like to think is an antique chemistry lab look, but is probably not the case).

    

As I applied the labels, I noticed that the moisture from my skin made the “frosting” rub off the paper… which gave me an idea. I grabbed a clean sheet and a damp paper towel, and buffed away like I was giving suede shoes a mirror finish. After about 20 minutes of carefully wiping the “frosting” off, I had what looked like a sheet of packing tape.

The bottom sugar label is the frosted look and the top sugar label is after my buffing work.

And here’s a shot to show the frosted paper versus unfrosted after applied on the jars.

Julie printed and cut another set of labels, and we finally achieved the look we were going for. I was paranoid about the ink rubbing off such a high-sheen surface, so I only handled the labels by the very outer edges, and we used Q-tips to push the air bubbles out.

I just never realized how much sugar we have in this house.

After.

Here’s the final line-up.

And a close up of our beautiful new food storage solution.

And here they are in our stunning new pantry.

I think I may have a new label fetish.  Hmm… need to find more things to make Chris label stat.