I Wish I Had Thought of This:

If you like to bake, as I do, you soon run into the problem of where to store all those essential baking pans. Cookie sheets, pizza pan, cake pans in assorted sizes, pie plates, bundt pans, springform pans and more. If you have a small kitchen like mine it’s even worse. I know what your cabinets look like, because mine look that way, too.

I got one of those vertical organizers for holding things like pan lids and baking sheets. It takes up the entire top shelf in the pan cabinet. It keeps the nonstick surfaces from scratching, but it’s not an efficient use of space. So I ran across this little gem while wandering around the Ikea website:

I want about three sets of these. One an inch from the top of the cabinet for my cookie sheets and pizza pan. One two inches below that for my cake pans and pie plates and griddle. Another one two inches below that for my cutting boards. I will have to set a shelf of some kind on the second shelf to support the cake pans and pie plates, but that’s easily done. By using 5 inches of otherwise wasted space I will reclaim an entire shelf.

But you don’t even have to buy the brackets from Ikea. You can hammer in four brads and set a piece of quarter-inch plywood on them. You can hammer in more brads and lace twine to support something light. You can even modify this idea to suspend your cutting boards horizontally below your upper cabinets. They would be off the counter but easy to grab there. My mind is swirling with the possibilities.

Headphone Cozy

Sweetie is a musician, and wears his headphones while he composes. His favorite Sennheiser headphones still worked perfectly, but the plastic over the foam earpieces was frayed and falling apart. It was irritating his ears. Sennheiser headphones aren't inexpensive, so I offered to make a soft knit cover for the earpieces. And I did.

I used black cotton Peaches and Cream yarn. For each cozy I cast 30 stitches on to size 2 needles, and did 8 rows of k1 p1 ribbing. Rather than binding off I ran the yarn through the loops and pulled it to the right size. I then stitched 3/4 of the side seam using that same yarn. I placed the cozy on the earpiece and finished stitching the side seam with the wire to the earpiece coming out through the seam. I tied off the yarn. Then I took the loose yarn from the casting on of stitches and ran it through the first row of stitches, as if I was picking up stitches. I pulled this yarn snugly to hold the earpiece in position and tied it off. I did it all again for the second earpiece.