I have been staring into my spice cabinet for months trying to decide just how to overhaul the whole mess. It needed to be neat and orderly, preferably with the jars or canisters all the same size. And I need to be able to find things easily. It wouldn’t hurt for it to be pretty too.

After much internet searching and looking and window shopping I settled on what I think is both pretty and affordable – half pint ball jars. I love my bigger jars – both half-gallon and quarts – for bigger quantities of items in my other cabinets so the half pints were just an extension of my jar obsession. Here’s what my other cabinet looks like. Don’t mind the sagging shelf. It was sagging pre-jars.

The mason jars are also re-usable for other purposes should I change my mind down the road. I went with half pints instead of regular pints because they take up less space. I have a lot of spices and want to fit them all in my cabinet. I do think the small jelly jars would be good too for the spices you don’t have lots of. I have some dried stevia from my garden in a jelly jar and it works nicely.

Once I decided to use the half pints I needed to nail down a good way to label them. Because of the design on the jars there isn’t a good place for label other than the top. In a moment of genius (at least I think so) I realized that my refrigerator magnets stick to the top of the jars. I just so happened to have a sheet of printable magnet paper left over from our wedding save the date magnets (from 5+ years ago) down in my craft drawer. I designed the labels as circles because that was what was aesthetically pleasing to me. They aren’t fancy, but are easily readable, and are quickly removable if you run out of a spice and want to put that jar into rotation as something else.

They could also be printed on sticker paper or vinyl for a more permanent solution. Actually, if I owned a vinyl cutter I probably would have gone that route for durability and for the fun general craftiness of the whole thing. But I had magnet sheet, so you get what you get.  🙂

Here’s what the labeled jars look like.

Click on the picture below to download your own set of printable spice jar labels!

I am working on a second page of labels for more spices. If there’s one you’d like to see leave a comment and I’ll put it in!

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