My funny little niece received a beautiful play kitchen from
my sister and her hubby this year for Christmas. My sister asked for the other
gifts from the family to go with it. Play dishes, food, etc.
In the midst of making dinner (and consequently, a grocery
list…) I emptied a few spice containers. Thought about washing them to use for
herbs from this year’s garden, and then realized I really have enough. So I
thought about tossing them.
And then I remembered Christmas.
Win.
I did wash them.
And here’s what else I did with them.
I could’ve left them as-is, and it would have been fine, but
I just can’t help myself sometimes. So I got out the construction paper, mod
podge, marker, stencil, and a couple other fun things.
I had asked my sister whether her daughter would have fun
with little things to shake in the spice containers (I’ll never forget the
little toy salt and pepper she and I had growing up- they had little plastic
bits you could see shaking around as you “salted” you play-food. It was
delightful.), or whether she’d be frustrated at a glued-shut lid. My sister
replied that her daughter loves to open things and would probably either get
frustrated that it wouldn’t open, or break it open, one of the two.
Since I wanted neither to happen, I came up with a compromise, as you’ll see
below.
First, I have a very technical way to measure the paper.
Lay the container next to it, make a little mark where I
want to cut. Then roll it around to see how big it should be to go all the way
around, and make another mark. Cut accordingly.
Told you it was technical. Ha.
When I had all the papers cut, I wrote on them. I used the
Tupperware alphabet stencil I found at a garage sale. It made such adorable
letters! I could have freehanded it, but I was happy enough with the stencil
that I decided to go the easy route and stencil it.
I went for “Sugar”, “Spice”, and “Everything Nice”… because that’s what little
girls are made of.
Not that she’ll be cooking up little girls any time soon…
I hope.
For the pepper container, since it wasn’t round, I looked at
the faint folds in the paper from when I wrapped it around to see where I ought
to write the words. And I wrote it on both sides. You can do yours however.
I mod-podged them on (See my
newsprint tray tutorial for tips on mod podge if you’ve never done it before, so you don’t end up with
wrinkly labels on your play-kitchen spices.) and then added some little
paper-punch stars. I used a scrapbooking star punch, and punched various colors.
I even used the construction paper packaging from the store (The one that is on
the top, like the label for the pack of paper. “250 sheets! 8 colors!” or
whatever… Yep I saved that.) to punch stars with. It made some of them have a
fun color pattern. (I must not have gotten any pictures of that part.)
I modpodged the stars on as I did my second coat of mod podge. By
the time I got to the fourth spice thing, the first was dry enough for me to
add a third coat. I have no idea if it really needed that much mod-podge but I
thought more is probably better when it’s going to be a toddler toy. More
durable that way.
So about the shaking/opening dilemma. I really really wanted
to put something in there to shake around, but wanted to honor my sisters
request to just leave them all openable. Here’s my compromise.
The two “Spice” containers and the “Pepper” container I left openable and
empty. They weren’t really see-through enough to warrant shaky little pieces
inside anyway.
But the more clear one (from parsley or something?) also had the
two-way lid (pour and shake) so the lid opened with a flip top, instead of just
the screw-off. With me so far? After punching a decent amount of fun-foam
confetti and putting it inside (actually I gave up on using the hole-punch and
just cut little tiny pieces with scissors. It was faster) I cut a circle in the fun-foam the same size
as the lid and superglued it inside. Then I superglued the lid onto the
container over that. So you can still open the shaker, but no pieces come out.
Win-Win.
And that’s all I did! You can go easier or more complicated-
totally up to you. You could do more writing on it, or cut out some pictures
from magazines to mod-podge on there, or whatever!
I’d love to see pics or hear your ideas of what you did.
