I love to cook. I enjoy trying new recipes, including international dishes, many of which require unique spices. So, I have a large collection of spices which I decided to organize. I had spices on the counter top, in a spinning organizer, in three drawers, and on two shelves. (Sorry, I don't have before pictures.) One goal was to clear my counter top. Another goal was to organize them somehow. Finally, I wanted them all in one place.
I had this spinning spice organizer on the counter.
It holds 24 spices, with pre-labeled tops, in 2" glass jars which look like this:
One would think that 24 spice jars were enough. But noooo. I had more than 24 spices. Plus, some of them were in large bottles and others were in packages. I had to find a solution that would work, for the most part, to include different sizes.
While wandering the isles of a store, I impulsively bought this spice rack.
I liked how it would fit different sizes, was compact, and didn't sit on the counter. But, I decided I wanted to save money and use whatever I already had on hand. So, I returned it to the store.
I went through my spices and threw away unidentifiable ones, grouped duplicates, and came up with a strategy. I was going to decant as many spices into the 24 little bottles that came with the spinning spice organizer. Then I would use other little spice bottles for what was leftover. I washed and dried all of the bottles before refilling them.
I decided to store all of the remaining spices in three drawers which are to the left of my stove.
The top drawer is shallow and would fit all of the short bottles. The second and third drawers are deep and can fit the tall, large, and odd-shaped packages.
To fit more bottles in the drawers, I decided to stand them up so that the tops would show and not the labels on front of the jar. This meant that I had to identify the spices that weren't in jars with pre-labeled tops. I also wanted a consistent look for all of the tops.
One thing I have a lot of is paper crafting supplies. I decided to go with a low tech solution using my paper crafting supplies. Here are the supplies I used.
I decided to label all of the jars using white card stock cut into circles that cover the tops. I hand wrote the spice names on the card stock and then adhered it to the tops using Glue Dots. Here is the results.
I keep extra blank labels already cut into circles, a roll of Glue Dots, and a black marker inside the top drawer along side of the bottles.
The middle drawer looks like this.
The bottom drawer isn't organized yet. I ran out of steam after finishing the second drawer. It'll do for now.
