March 5th, 2009
I have the cutest little pantry in my kitchen. It is about 4.5 feet tall and has a little glass door and a nice wide ledge. Ever since I moved here, I have been wanting some fabulous and large glass canisters to put on top. I was so happy a few weeks ago, when I found these beautiful 2.5 gallon canisters at Amazon:
My birthday just happened to be this week, and I asked for three of these puppies (I put a few more on my wedding registry because I love them so much. I want to do one for Rice and one for Bread Flour).
As soon as I got them, I filled them up with flour, sugar, and rolled oats. But what I really couldn’t wait to do, was to make labels for them! Here they are looking adorable on my pantry:
The glass on these jars is a little wavy and imperfect, and I love the dark lids – they definitely have an antique feel. So I made some cute distressed labels (available for download at the end of this post). I printed and cut them out and they were super cute…
… but I really wanted them to have an older feel than just flat printed paper. So I pulled out some supplies:
> a moist/wet paper towel
> distressing ink – Tim Holtz Antique Linen & vintage photo
> emry board – fine sand paper will do
> A flat clean work surface that can get wet/messy.
I printed my labels on regular bond paper. I recommend testing your distressing process on some test paper before going at the printed items. Also if you get water on an inkjet print, it will run, so if you want to get really down and dirty, print your labels with a laser printer. I didn’t worry about the ink running on the lighter parts of the design, but I did try and keep the paper away from the letters since they are so dark.
Step 1: Crinkle your labels. I recommend bigger, deeper folds and creases. As long as the paper is dry, you can be pretty rough with it. I bent and tore and creased quite a bit so that the ink would have a lot of fun detail to hold onto:
Step 2: Wet your labels. I used a wet paper towel to dab water around the edges. You definitely want the paper soaked, but not so much that it tears or bleeds into the center. You have to work fast at this point because it needs to be pretty wet for the next step. You may want to do step 2 & step 3 to one side at a time to keep your paper from drying too fast.
Step 3: Once you have a wet edge, go ahead and use the lighter ink on the wet parts. The ink should bleed as soon as it hits the water and create a “dying” effect as opposed to an “inking” effect. This will make it look aged and not just inked. After a little light inking, I applied just a tiny bit of dark inking on some of the edges:
At this point your paper will be pretty wet and your wrinkles will have disappeared, but they will come back. Just finish each label and set them aside to dry. I let mine dry about 30 minutes. Here is how they looked after I let them sit for a bit:
I love how aged they look and how stiff they feel after drying. I will definitely use this technique on more projects in the future.
If I had printed them on a laser printer, I would have made the entire label more “dyed” looking, but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.
Attaching the labels was really easy, I used a large glue-dot in each corner. I don’t recommend this if you have a lot of people accessing your canisters, but I know its enough adhesive for my uses with the upside being that I can change them out pretty easy when I get bored of the look. You could use spray adhesive or run them through a larger xyron after they have dryed completely. If you printed on a laser printer, I imagine you could use Mod Podge, just test it on the glass first to see if it drys clear enough.
Here is a before & after shot. I really should have taken a before shot when the pantry was covered in half-empty flour and sugar bags, paper plates & food boxes.
I love how they look, how big the labels are, and just the overall vintage styling with the large black lids + the aged labels. So yummy.
You can really see the variety in the glass from this photo. I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out!
As promised, here is the label file. I did have to make it just a smidge smaller than the one I used in order to fit all the labels on one 8.5×11.
Download this label file and enjoy (for personal use only ). Please tell your friends to come visit the site and download their own labels. I would love a comment if you do download!
Each of these files are a 8.5″x11″ PDF. Use Acrobat Reader to open the file and print as many as you like! Happy project-ing!
If you are another blog or crafting site and would like to link this project to your site, please contact me. Thanks!
xoxo Jen Allyson
February 24th, 2009
Today I was feeling especially motivated to organize (one of my favorite thing to do). So I finally bit the bullet and got some great clear bins at Costco. Although I live in a small apartment in San Francisco, I have 2 really nice big closets. Since moving here they have become increasingly more frightening to open. So I took a little time this evening and I went through both of my closets and organized everything that I could into bins:
The next step in my organization was to make some cute labels! My second favorite thing is to make cute labels! What a good day! So I designed these labels (Available for free download at the end of this post), printed and cut them out:
Once they were all cut out, I ran them through my xyron 250 machine. If any of you don’t know what this is — its the most amazing invention to come to paper crafting. you basically slide your paper (or buttons or ribbon anything thin enough) through the front and turn the wheel, and it comes out the back A STICKER! I’m being completely serious here. You have to see it in person, but whatever you put in, comes out with the perfect amount of adhesive adhered to the back. Get one!
Once the labels were all made into stickers, I just threw them up on the containers!
And some up-close shots:
I am so so happy to have this done. The closets look amazing and with the labels, everything now has its own little home! Hopefully this will motivate you to do a little bit of spring cleaning and organizing. Be sure to download some labels so that you can keep all your stuff straight! I’d love to hear about your organization methods and be sure to leave a comment if you do download the labels. xoxo Jen Allyson
Download PDF Labels>> Label Page 1 & Label Page 2
February 7th, 2009
I am sure there are some of you out there who have a big binder or recipe book full of disorganized recipe cards. I know I have been planning on organizing mine for the past 7 years. I decided a few weeks ago that I would design some cute tabs and cards and just get it done. I was talking to my friend Carina and we decided to design a few different sets and sell them as digital kits in our Two Peas in a Bucket stores.
I designed the cute bird set that you see above as well as as adorable pink and red cherry set. Here you can see all the items:
As you can see, each set has 4 tabed cards (4 with labels and 4 blank for you to customize), 1 3×5 recipe card (one with lines and one without), 1 kitchen note design, 5 large canister labels and a background pattern that you can print on the back of your items.
The first step to make the organized recipe box is to print out the background paper image for as many recipe cards and tabbed dividers as you want. Then flip the paper over in your printed and print out those tabbed dividers and recipe cards. I set all mine up in photoshop on an 8.5×11 canvas size so that I could print out 4 per paper. Once they are printed, go ahead and cut each item out. I used scissors, but a nice paper trimmer would make pretty short work of the job.
Note the background paper is now printed on the backside of my items. So adorable!
If you are pretty computer savvy, you can fill out the blank recipe cards in a photo editing program such as photoshop or photoshop elements, otherwise you can just print out the lined recipe cards and write on them by hand.
Even if you print your cards with the recipes already on them, its probably a good idea to have some extra lined cards for new recipes.
Once you have all your recipes written down, go ahead and place them in your recipe box and organize! See that wasn’t so bad – and it looks so good!
This kit and other “Kitchen 1-2-3″ kits (Carina has 3 other styles for sale as well) will be available for purchase on Tuesday February 10th from Two Peas in a Bucket!
January 31st, 2009
There is this great little grocery store just a few blocks from my apartment. Everytime I go there, I look at their amazing bakery and see these fabulous jam-filled heart cookies. But of course I never buy them, and if I did, they would probably be like 3 dollars a piece. So I decided in honor of valentines day, I would make some myself! They were so easy, and exceptionally good! You should definitely try them.
I just moved and have barely any kitchen stuff, so baking presents quite the challenge. For these cookies you will need:
1. A Rolling Pin
2. 2 nesting heart-shapped cookie cutters (I found mine for $1 a piece)
3. Sugar cookie dough recipe + ingredients – or pre-made sugar cookie dough (I totally cheated!).
3b. Extra flour & powdered sugar
4. Red jam
5. Cookie Sheet
First step is to make the dough – or pretend you made the dough. When I use pre-made dough, I always add just a little bit of flour so it doesn’t stick to everything.
Next you’ll need to roll it out. I recommend 3/16″ (just a little less than a quarter of an inch) because you’ll be putting together two cookies in the end, so it gets a bit bulky. This also depends on how much your dough rises.
Once you’ve rolled out your dough, go ahead and use the cookie cutters to cut the big hearts in the dough. At this point you’ll want to cut little hearts in HALF of the big hearts.
I just made a few cookies because I didn’t want to eat a dozen or so. If you are going to make a lot of these, I would recommend making your own dough, that pre-made stuff is expensive. But if you really need to save time, it only took me about 20 min from start to finish to make these awesome cookies.
Next you’ll want to bake the cookies. Just follow the instructions on your recipe. The hardest part of this whole thing was transferring the dough to the baking sheet without ruining the shape. Here are the cookies after they were baked. I also baked the little inner hearts, but had to do it on a second sheet.
I let the cookies cool for about a minute on the pan, then they are easy to move to a paper towel or cooling rack. The assembly of the final cookies is pretty easy. I had the cut-out hearts on one side and dusted them with powdered sugar. Then the whole hearts I covered with a thin layer of jam – a bit thicker towards the center.
The final assembly consisted of placing the dusted hearts on the jammed hearts. Viola! Beautiful jam filled heart cookies! These were so so yummy, I’m going to make a big batch for Mr. Project to take to work on valentine’s day!
If you are wanting to make the dough from scratch, I found this super easy recipe online:
Raspberry Sandwich Heart Cookies
Happy Valentine Baking!
January 15th, 2009
My First Project! And hopefully the first of many.
I did something unthinkable to me just 6 months ago… I set out to start AND finish a personal project and I actually did it! I do so many projects for work and if I do have any free time, I usually spend it on facebook or surfing the internet. So first of all, I’m so very proud of myself. Secondly, I can’t believe I successfully used my sewing machine! About 13 months ago I bought an amazing sewing/embroidery machine and have yet to sew something completely by myself on it.
So I wanted to start with something fairly simple… ya know a good warm up to this uncharted territory of actually completing a project. About 6 months ago I bought a sewing project kit by Amy Butler. It has patterns of neat stuff AND even came with some fabric.
The box that I bought from Barnes & Noble
This is what the pattern shows is the "Final Product"
What you’ll need for this project:
1. Fabric – The pattern specifies wool. In my project closet I found 1 fat square of wool and a few bits of felt. I think this project would be fun in all felt — and no frayed edges.
2. A few basic sewing items: scissors, ruler, chalk pencil, seam ripper, thread, needle, pins . After having completed the project, I would recommend a rotary cutter for the squares.
You can see why I need a new pin cushin...
3. A Sewing Machine
4. Apparently it is necessary to have an iron to sew… But I don’t have one… So I used my Flat iron to get the fabric flat.
After you have wrinkle-free fabric, you need to measure and cut it. I couldnt find my fabric ruler, so I used a tape measure… My mother would be mortified, but it worked! I marked 3.5″ along a straight looking edge of fabric and then cut the whole strip.
After I cut out one strip, I layed it on top of the fabric and cut out an identical strip.
I then layed the two strips on each other but at a 90 degree angle to get the perfect height for my pieces. Once I had a 3.5″ x3.5″ square, I layed it on the other 3.5″ fabric strips to cut squares.
You will need 6 squares for this project.
Once you have the squares, you pretty much start sewing. If you are using a loose wool, you should sew a “stay stitch” which is basically a stitch close to the edge so that it does not frey.
After you have done the stay stitching, Start with 2 squares and sew the 4 squares to each other in a row. Keep the right sides facing inward/toward each other, because you’ll want the raw edges showing on your pin cushin.
After you sew the squares to each other, you’ll want to sew the row ends together to make an “open” cube like this:
Okay now for the tricky part… The pattern instructs you to pin the remaining squares on the top and bottom of your cube. So i pulled out my trusty pins and started…
This proved fairly difficult and after sewing the first square, I found it fairly unnecessary so I took out all the pins and just held one edge to another while sewing. Please note that all raw edges are on the outside of the cube.
sewing with the annoying pins
Next I had to do the same thing to the bottom — but only on 3 sides. This I did completely without the needles and it worked just fine.
the bottom sewn on three sides… waiting for stuffing
So I don’t have any stuffing in my closet, so when I got to this point I thought I would just walk 2 minutes to the local quilting shop… Well I walk in and ask for batting and they are all sold out! What was I to do?? I had to get this post out for my readers! So I did what any crazed crafter would do…
I found a pillow!
and some scissors!
Hehe I totally cannibalized a pillow… hopefully Mr. Project won’t mind! I don’t recommend it, but I had no other choice!
The pincushion with incriminating pillow stuffing. Note: you'll need about 2.5 times more than you think you will
stuffed!
Okay to the hardest part… sewing the last panel while smooshing a 3.5″ cube through your sewing machine:
But… once that part was over! I had a fabulous cubic pincushion! Just trim all the loose threads and stick in some pins!
Sooooo… there’s my new fabulous pincushion! However, because I am crazy, I couldn’t stop at just a pin cushion… tomorrow I’ll post the other very cool item I made from this same pattern!
