fair isle navajo

America loves BEFORE and AFTER. Right??

Me too. I love BEFORE and AFTER specials! They're so satisfying. Maybe I have a thing about watching people and places as they're sculpted or cleaned into tidier, sleeker, shinier versions. (Hopefully I'm not this bad, but still, he's pretty amazing...)

I think it's partly the satisfaction of watching something or someone be reformed. But it's also feeling like you've been let in on a secret, on someone's most private life. It's comforting to know that other people are also flawed, and sometimes, desperately in need of help to improve some area of their life. It's sort of like finally getting to see behind the public veneer of that really-put-together person, into their terrifyingly messy closet after it has exploded into an entire room!

The shame! The horror! The delight! It's a distinctly guilty pleasure. And I think it wins us all over in the end because BEFORE/AFTERs always have a happy ending.

So, in honor of the peculiar guilty pleasure that is BEFORE and AFTER, here's one of my (small) happy endings.



BEFORE:

DURING:

I was even patient and methodical and I washed my new, squat little containers first.

AFTER!

All my ducks in a row... No bags, less mess, more beauty. These have lovely wide mouths that you can actually fit a measuring spoon into! But, I wanted better light for my pictures. So I waited. And then I waited too long, and my battery was dead. So I had to use my old camera to capture the brief moment of golden sunshine that so brilliantly surprised me on Sunday afternoon.

Thanks to Smitten Kitchen for providing a better-spice-storage model! I guess you're supposed to store them somewhere that's not directly in the sun. That's the next step. (And thanks to my very dirty window sill for presenting another area for improvement...)