Mason Jar Chalkboard Lids

Mason Jar Chalkboard Lids

My daughter is a crafting machine. Seriously, she’s always working on something. Whether it’s crochet, those rainbow loom bracelets, her mini pottery wheel, friendship bracelets, painting, cutting, gluing, drawing, you name it and she’s crafting it. Even when she watches TV she’s got something in her lap that involves twisting, braiding or beading of some kind. I’m really glad that she’s so creative but unfortunately she’s also a huge mess maker. These crafts are always all over the house. Since my wife and I don’t want to be the cleanup crew 24/7, we decided we needed a way to keep everything more organized. If these things have a place, then it’s easy for the kids to put them back in their place when they’re done. So it was time to create a cool crafty work space for the family. Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the craft table/room project and these Mason Jar Chalkboard Lids will be a big help in organizing it.

Since we have so many craft supplies the first thing I wanted to do was come up with an organized way to store everything. I also didn’t want to just put these supplies away in a closet because you know what happens then? Out of sight, out of mind. When supplies are hidden away, you forget that you have them. All of the cool craft rooms or craft work spaces that I saw on Pinterest had shelves of supplies that you could easily see and get to.

The easiest way to accomplish this was to store the crafts in mason jars. You can buy mason jars for about a $1 each and they look good on a shelf filled with craft supplies.

We decided that we’d also get some chalkboard paint for the lids so that we could write descriptions of what’s stored inside. This becomes necessary when have a shelf full of mason jars stacked 3 or 4 deep. We figured that with a quick glance at the top of the jar, you could see what you need and get to it.

Chalkboard paint is really easy to use. It’s just like regular paint. I bought a small can of chalkboard paint at Lowes but it also comes in spray paint form too. The nice smooth lids of the mason jars took up the paint with no problems.

Writing the names of the supplies on the lids in chalk was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I have a new found respect for my old school teachers now. But I found out the secret to those amazing chalkboards that coffee houses and cafes use to display their specials. Some of those chalkboard artists use something called chalkboard paint markers. Writing a drawing with a magic marker is much easier than piece of chalk. I definitely have to buy some of these for future chalkboard projects.

So that’s one of the first steps of the craft table/room project. Actually, painting the walls (with regular paint, not chalkboard paint) was the first step but that wouldn’t make for an interesting blog post. Next up is to put up some shelves and do lots of organizing. More soon.