I've always been attracted to those old, vintage kitchen tins. I owned some lovely ones for a while that were shiny and silver with sleek black labels reading COFFEE, SUGAR, TEA, and FLOUR. They looked great, but they weren't large enough to contain the amount of tea and coffee that Garth and I keep in our house. We also use a variety of flours, sugars, and other dry goods that deserve convenient containers. I don't expect to find manufactured containers with the perfect labels for my specific kitchen, but I did want to create a system to organize all the dry goods in our kitchen. In our house, both Garth and I cook, though I tend to be the person who arranges things in the kitchen. My hope is that a well displayed, well labeled wall of ingredients would cut down on his cries of, "Hey! Where is the ________?" and my later question, "When you were cooking the other day, where on earth did you put the ______?" The solution was fairly easy, attractive, and not very labor intensive. While fixing up our kitchen I left a cabinet door off one wall cabinet. This opened up shelves for a clear, organized display of our baking supplies, nuts, and dried fruits. Then I made my own equivalent of the old kitchen tins. First, I started to save glass jars. This can take a long time, especially if you think you will want some very large jars (as I did) and don't consume gallons of pickles. I searched our local thrift stores and came up with a small assortment of jars and then broke down and ordered some gallon sized ones from specialtybottle.com. I knew we would need these big ones for flour, sugar, and granola and they were fairly inexpensive (under $3) on that site. Next, I visited a craft store and found some scrapbooking letters in a font that I liked (score one more for the scrapbookers!). I choose a font that was available in multiple sizes so I could vary the size of my letters according to the sizes of my jars. I also picked up some cheap, standard masking tape. The magic tools for this project were a jar of glass etch and an inexpensive one inch paint brush (both were available at my craft store). For those of you unfamiliar with glass etch, it's an acid that's strong enough to eat away any glass surface.  It's not great for your hands or lungs, so proceed with caution. Glass etch is a very easy to use material that works with pre-cut stencils sold in craft stores, or anything you can find to mask the surface of glass so it only etches away at unmasked areas. I carefully taped off a square area on each jar with my masking tape and then applied my scrap-booking letters to spell out whatever I might like to keep in the jar: FLOUR, SUGAR, GRANOLA, etc. After the jar was labeled, I smoothed the tape and letters to completely stick to the glass. Being certain that the masking is firmly stuck to the glass is key to getting clean, legible labels. Next, I painted the glass etch over the entire square area I had masked off. The etch takes five minutes to work. After five minutes I simply rinsed the etch away, peeled off my tape and stickers and I had a jar perfectly suited to hold whatever dry ingredient I wanted to store. When the jars were completely dry I filled them with our dry goods. Now we have an organized area in the kitchen to keep a variety of ingredients that used to clutter the cabinets. I shop for these items in the bulk section of our grocery store now and no longer keep scattered bags, tins and boxes. Our kitchen goods are much easier to find and use, and I don't have to run to the kitchen to help Garth locate a mysteriously hidden bag of cake flour!

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