I’ve always been inspired by glimpses of organized pantries. In particular, I had seen chef Michael Smith’s pantry on his cooking shows. He’s always grabbing a mason jar full of some spice or another.

I always have mason jars on hand, either for my preserves, or that I save from jarred pasta sauces. In my new old house kitchen, there were initially signs of creatures – rodent droppings to be specific, and I don’t want to even think about which ones. We have renovated our kitchen – being careful to fill all the potential holes in floors and walls. Hopefully that does the trick for ridding us of creatures. In the mean time I thought I would start my pantry project. I’ve been sealing up all of my spices and staples in mason jars, and labelling them with chalkboard style black labels from Michaels.

I just did my best hand lettering, going over the vertical lines again to thicken the letters, and adding little ticks at the tops and bottoms to dress up the letters a bit, but not worrying about perfection.

I initially used a white wax marker, and chalk markers – but guess what? These looked awful – they were’t crisp enough, and of course they smudge when you pick up the jars.

So I switched to White Sharpie markers in a medium tip. These went on well, and were fairly easy to work with. It would likely be a great computer printer project for printing out labels I suppose, or maybe for a Cricut, but my hand lettered labels will do the trick. I have been filling out the jars and labels a few at a time, so in retrospect it would have been better to use all the same format of label, and to label all of the tops of the jars, but that’s not how life works at the moment.

We are planning on placing some more shelves in our kitchen, and inside the upper landing of our basement stairs which go off of the kitchen. For now, I found an old wicker corner shelf which tucks in next to our vintage refrigerator. My spices and staples are labelled and sorted and should stay creature free and ready to use! Now if only I could cook like a chef.