My personal alchemy lab

♫ Sabaton – The Hammer Has Fallen

There are a hundred things I could do, should do, or would do (if) and I'm not sure if I'm good at prioritizing my projects, but when I suddenly got a strong urge to make custom labels for my spice jars, I just... well, put everything else off. Okay not really, but at least I completed this project rather fast.

Or too fast. :> The final stages, i.e. printing, cutting and sticking the labels to the jars were carried out late in the evening, and the kitchen was quite dark too when I eyed the line of my new custom jars in my cupboard and happily closed the cupboard door. And now the daylight (and especially the photos) reveal the ugly truth: I cannot cut anything even if my life depended on it. Seriously, I've never been too handy with scissors, and even though most lines have been cut with a paper knife and a ruler, the results are not too good on average. But I blame it on my desk lamp which recently resigned office.

I would have wanted to create labels which seem very old and probably bear resemblance to poison bottles and such, preferably printed on a brown paper... But since my spice jars are genuine Ikea products and don't look old, antique, vintage or whatever, I decided to go for a less extreme style. As you can see, the background isn't pure white (but I've failed to cut off the extra white paper here and there!). I looked up some instructions on how to use all those spices on the internet and put a brief description in the labels simply because I need some guidance. I am not the worst cook, but experimenting with spices isn't my area of expertise. However, I also wanted to add some useless information as well, such as the Latin names and some labels even got a suggestion for medicinal uses. (And in case you understand Finnish, don't try to use those tips! :D They may be accurate (or pure superstition) but I wouldn't really try to pour parsley tea into my eyes.) I guess pirates need medicinal herbs though...

I drew more or less accurate pictures of most spices, yet spice blends got a picture of a random spice bottle and cardamom had to settle for a pastry since cardamom seeds look too strange and I've never used it for anything but baking.

And I should have taken all the photos from this angle so that you wouldn't have seen all that salt on my shelf. Oops, I've forgotten to clean it. :x Maybe one day I can replace those Ikea jars with something resembling old apothecary jars and bottles and create labels which seem more mysterious. However, I think those are better than the masking tape strips which marked the jars before. So long!

P.S: I was positively surprised to find matte sticker paper which was very affordable too. I bought a variety which hadn't been die-cut into smaller labels of a certain size because I want to be able to use it for versatile projects. However, the backing paper was a pain to remove!

P.P.S: What is your favorite spice and why? I love the scent of cinnamon, cardamom and curry. I know cinnamon isn't particularly healthy (at least not the cheap type) but if I buy vanilla ice cream, I eat it with cinnamon (doesn't happen too often though). I would like to use (mild) curry more, but I am still not too good at experimenting. Oh, and one of my favorites: lemon pepper! It goes with almost anything. :D (Not really, but I love it anyway.) I love the scent and flavor of lemons, though I don't really eat the actual fruits.