Before/After and Mittens!

In keeping with my last post, which suggests that there are things I CAN do that will help in preventing 'failure-itis', I've made a pair of mittens and organized my spice rack.  First, my spice rack... I use the term 'rack' loosely.  It was two cardboard boxes in my pantry overflowing with zipper bags and jars and containers full of spices.  I do like to cook but I HATED going into the 'area' and looking for something.  More often than not I'd buy new apparently because I sure had some duplicates in there!  So taking inspiration from Tara, I asked a friend of mine to save me about two dozen baby food jars and I made myself a neater and more user friendly spice storage solution.  The original plan was to use scrap booking paper and spray paint and magnets, but when it came right down to it, I couldn't wait to get everything I needed together to make the spices look nice, I just had to get it done.  So I went as basic as possible and printed cute tags off the printer, hand wrote the labels and voila!  It makes the pantry much less offensive and it looks kind of cute too... I threw out all the rest of the bags and bags of spices I had because baby food jars hold a LOT and I knew by the time I was done with what was in the jars, the extra would have been stale and unuseable so I saved myself some time!  I did keep extras of curry and chili powder because I use a disgusting amount of each of those!

And then I made myself some mittens.  In my never ending quest to make sure i"m warm enough in Alcatraz, I'm knitting myself a matching toque and mitt combo.  I couldn't find mitts I liked enough so I made up my own pair.  They're knit flat and then I'll sew them together.  The nice thing is that due to the 'design' (I use the term loosely), the top of the hand will be double layer knit and the palm (where it's always warmer) will be single layer.  I effed up the thumbs on both and they currently don't even match but I"m not so sure I care!  The buttons are vintage... brass with white enamel and tiny shank style red ones that have a liquid soap/herringbone' type pattern on the top.