Cute, Almost Free Storage

I've been pining for and pinning craft room ideas for a few years now. I'm proud to say I finally have it. It's more of a corner, really, but I'm in love. And I'll show it all in a few days, but first some of the details.

I have a lot of random craft crap. Some of it is cute, some, not so much. So, for about two years I saved oatmeal containers and spaghetti and baby food jars. The oatmeal containers were simple to transform. I just peeled of the label, added new ones of old newspaper, maps, and scrapbook papers. I decided to make the new labels much smaller to let the Kraft paper-looking cardboard show through.

I also cut circles to fit on the top. I may still add chalkboard labels somewhere, because I crammed so much stuff in those tubs and I already forgot what all's in there.

The jars were probably the biggest hold up. I thought I could remove the sticky label glue with hot water and scrubbing, but that didn't work. I finally discovered dipping them in a pot of boiling vinegar. Worked like a charm. My awesome sister-in-law used her Silhouette machine to cut out cute labels in three different sizes. She used chalkboard Contact paper, so the labels peel off and stick on easy peasy. A whole roll was less than $8 and she made a ton of labels for me and still had paper left for herself (she was eyeing her pantry last we talked)

I spray painted the jar lids red. The baby food jars look great, but the large lids ended up pretty streaky. The unlidded jars look ok, but don't want to deal with dust, and I prefer the jars with lids, so it looks like I'll be hoarding pasta lids again.

And then there are these babies:

I scored them for FREE this summer at the grocery store on a double-fortuitous day. The only problem with these bad boys were that they made the spaghetti jar sticky-stuff removal look like child's play. I'm not really sure what finally did the trick, but it must've been a combination of soaking in hot water, drowning in vegetable oil, smearing peanut butter over the label, then scraping with a spatula, steel wool, my fingernails, and a scrubby sponge. The plastic was a little scratched up after the process, but I labeled the back side, and once I loaded them up you could hardly tell.  

Check out all the other storage in my craft "room" here.