tin collection

I'm back! I hope you all had a great holiday! Are you thinking of taking your decorations down yet? I had thought about putting them up after we moved, but now that we're here, decorating for Christmas is the last thing on my mind. Unless it involves decorating that gingerbread house we bought. Mmm gingerbread!

Anyway, we've been trying to get sorted since the movers left, and things are going relatively well -- relatively because everytime I see something, it immediately goes missing about an hour later and I never see it again; and because I feel like I have too much stuff and not enough places to put it so everything's getting dumped out of boxes and scattered around haphazardly. We're trying very hard to resist a trip to IKEA for bookshelves. I don't really want anymore IKEA furniture.

So today I'm working on unpacking my tin collection (because they were all in a very large box taking up a huge amount of space) and, as promised, I'll share some of my favourites!

I love the unusual shape of this tin. Plus the orange colours and flowers are really dramatic and fresh looking (flowers are one of the main unifiers to my tin collection. I noticed that it's all about flowers when it comes to my tins) and I always pounce on any tin that has a hinged lid which this one has.

I love this one because of the shooting star plants on the sides. They're really special to me because purple shooting stars grow wild on the farm where I grew up. I used to have a plant that I dug out of the field and put into my rock garden and it was doing so well it had multiplied. Unfortunately, the thing about shooting stars is that they only grow leaves and flowers during the spring and then they die back completely during the summer so you can't see them. I think they were accidentally dug up at some point, because I haven't seen them for a few springs now. I'll have to find some more, but I've never seen them in garden centres. They're kinda rare.

Surprise! A tin with birds on it. Who would've guessed? This is the most dented and scratched tin in my collection and I bought it that way. I was sad it was in such terrible condition, but I couldn't leave it in the store because of the birds. They kind of look like magpies to me and I thought that was an unusual bird to be on a tin.

I love this one for the colours, the unusual shape (again), the polka dots and the hinged lid (I told you I was fixated on those!)

These are my two Greek-themed tins. Interestingly enough, I bought these before meeting Idle Husband. Now they're special to me only because they make me think of Greece. The light blue one holds all my extra spices!

While we're on nationalities, this is my Scottish tin. I actually never bought this one, it came from my grandma. She kept small sewing things and thread in it.

This is probably the most expensive tin I have. I think I bought it for $15 if I recall correctly. I really laboured over that decision, but I'm really happy I decided to get it. Squirrels and acorns on teal? When would you ever see that again?

So are you wondering where I'm putting all of these? I thought that (for now at least) I'd put them on top of my kitchen cabinets where I used to keep my vases. I kinda want to switch back and forth between the vases (for summer) and the tins (for winter), but who knows what'll actually happen. That was just my original thought. Maybe once we get some more shelving, I'll have them out all of the time.

Anyway, I encountered a slight problem when I started putting them on the cabinets. The top of the cabinets are actually a lot lower than they look, so the crown moulding tends to hide the shorter tins. At first, I started searching around for something to sit them on and then I had a bit of a revelation. The tins with removable lids get their lids removed and displayed just as a lid (that's usually the prettiest part anyway) and the bottoms get turned upside-down to function as little tables for the shorter tins. I was so happy I figured that out before I started constructing stacks and tables out of leftover cardboard and styrofoam!

I need to add more and keep adjusting how they look, but it's getting there and the box is finally empty!