My First Date with Mason Jars

I've been wanting to post these for a while, but never got around to taking pictures. This was one of my first kitchen projects and also the beginning of my relationship with Mason jars. I had been searching for several weeks for food canisters to place on my kitchen counter. This is something I had always wanted but I didn't like the price of them and also didn't like that each canister in a set was a different size. One day as I was strolling through the kitchen aisle of Canadian Tire I saw a box of large Mason jars for a fraction of the cost of the canister sets. This got the gears rolling and set my plan into motion. I picked up a box of 6 large Mason jars, a box of 8 medium ones and also a package of plastic lids that fit on small Mason jars (who knew these existed?).

That afternoon, I set to work cleaning out my cupboards and replaced all of the miscellaneous bags and packages of dried food with Mason jars. The large Mason jars I filled with my most commonly used baking goods such as flour and sugar and lined them up in a row on the back of my counter. They fit perfectly and looked beautiful but they still needed a little something extra...like labels!

Initially I scoured through all 500 of the fonts I have on my computer (yes, I realize I have an addiction!) until I found one that fit. I printed these off and used a circle punch to cut them all out. I then grabbed a handful of paper clips and using my hot glue gun, adorned them each with a little red button.  Each paper clip was then threaded through a string of black raffia which I tied around the neck of the Mason jars.  Lastly, I slipped my label into the paper clip, and voila, it was done! They looked pretty cute, however after a couple of weeks using my jars I fell quickly out of love. I was constantly having to make new labels whenever I filled the jar with something different.  The process of printing and punching new labels was tedious and I soon found that my new jars were sitting there plain and labelless. That's when inspiration hit!

I recall my sister-in-law raving about chalkboard paper that you could buy at the dollar store. She sent me a sample of it to try and it was fabulous! It came in a roll and the one side was chalkboard and the other was covered in adhesive so you could stick it to anything you pleased! I decided to adhere it to some red cardstock and then using my circle punch I cut out a stack of chalkboard circles. Now I could change these labels with a simple wipe! My ingenius husband came up with the best part...rather than using chalk, he gave me a piece of soapstone from his work that they use for writing on metal. Turns out it writes perfectly on the chalkboard paper without the muss and fuss of chalk! Here is the final product!

 

P.S. Speaking of Mason jars, have you seen American Craft's new line of Dear Lizzy paper? This one is my favourite! I couldn't resist buying it although I have no clue what I'm going to do with it yet. I'm sure you will see a layout soon featuring one of these adorable Mason jars!