Things I Didn’t Buy 81

Some vintage soda bottles.

And a vintage Dr Pepper soda bottle.

I liked this old Shasta cola can.

This vintage coffee pot had a cute design on it.

Finally, I liked this blue milk of magnesia bottle.

Things I Didn’t Buy 77

This mailbox coin bank was fantastic.

I liked this wall piece to hold letters.

Awesome old Safe Cure bottle label.

This vintage BP truck was cute.

I thought this old Portalloy binder cover was interesting.

Things I Didn’t Buy 7

I went to an estate sale and some shops and saw a few interesting things. First up, this cool scale.

Here are a lot of cute little bottles.

Remember Beanie Babies? This is where they end up: in boxes at an estate sale…no one wants them.

I just thought this mixer was interesting.

Chinese Checkers game.

This Kraft wood box I considered buying—it’s awesome. But I resisted…

And this just was sitting in a shop and it amused me: a paper shark attacking a boat.

Label Me

I keep more stuff than I ought to because I often see an item’s “potential”. I generally look at something and think, “I can use this in some way…someday” [although, to be honest I usually don’t get around to using those items any time soon and they just sit around waiting to be used. (Sigh.)] But I finally got around to using some spice jars that had been accumulating.

There are basically two ways to buy spices: in prepackaged bottles or in bulk. I have bought prepackaged spice jars, in part because of the options available in a store and in part because of convenience. There are plastic bottles and glass ones, and while I’ve bought both in the past, I like the glass ones and tend to keep them. Since I’ve accumulated some glass jars, I now feel more apt to get spices from the bulk section of a supermarket that I can refill my jars with.

So I washed my old spice jars out and removed the labels. Then I used a piece of black linen tape as my base (to create a border) and placed a white piece of artist tape (with the name already written on it) on top of it. I think I should be able to remove the white tape if I need to re-label the jar (or at the very least I could just put another piece of tape on top of it).

Besides using empty spice jars for spices, they’re good for holding other small items, like paper clips, tacks and beads—pretty much anything small or sharp that you want to keep a lid on.