I had been struggling with properly storing my spices for a while. I tried several boxes, but I had so many different brands of spices, meaning all kinds of different containers (glass, metal or plastic; round, square or flat; high or low; etc.) that nothing really fit together, leave alone look good. Then I read online that someone used Tic Tac boxes for taking spices with them on a holiday. Well… why not use them permanently?
Of course I could have bought some ready-made spice rack, but most spice jars are way too big for the amount I want to store, and those things are also ridiculously expensive! Besides, it is much more fun to recycle things and make something yourself!
Okay, the recycling-part didn’t actually happen, because I don’t eat Tic Tacs… So instead of saving up the dispensers, I deliberately bought a huge pack of them all at once, and donated their content to people who do like them. 😋
I bought the version that has 49 grams (100 Tic Tacs) instead of 18 grams, because the small ones would be too small to put all my current spices in.
After emptying them, I put the dispensers in a bowl of dishwater to soak, to get the stickers (and the mint smell) off. A few hours later, I could start drying everything. Very important, because putting spices in a damp jar is, of course, a recipe for disaster…
I put them on my radiator to dry for 1,5 day. Which, I should have realised, made my living room smell extremely minty…. *sigh*
In the meantime I printed the names of all my spices on sticker sheets.
Then came the fun part: transfering all the spices to the Tic Tac dispensers with the help of a small funnel, and then labeling them! After a few hours, the job was done.
Next, I made a wooden storage rack to keep them in, as the containers now all had the same measurements.
I finished the rack with a coat of stain:
Done!
And of course, the dispensers are all in alphabetical order. 😎