on the bandwagon, part 1

After consuming some of the best Vietnamese food in the city and an ill-advised iced coffee (it kept me up until the wee hours of the morning), Ptichka and I went to the local fancy pants grocery store in the neighborhood. And by fancy pants, I mean suburbanish. Wide aisles. A vast array of choices. Multiple floors. Covered parking. We normally shop at the aptly named NoFrills.

We needed kosher salt. Unfortunately one suburban trait that the fancy pants grocery store in our neighborhood does have is consistency. We've found the kosher salt with the run-of-the-mill salts, with the bulk items, and at the end of a random aisle. Never, of course, has it been spotted with the other kosher food items. That fact did not prevent us from checking out the kosher food section first, though. The prospect of looking at matzo, exotic candies, and kosher marshmallow fluff all in multilingual, retro packaging is too much for us to resist.

After checking out the candies, the soup mixes, and the fluff, I spotted a box of paper for lining shelves. A pile of them were among boxes of Shabot candles. I suppose that there was some free real estate in that area of the store. The new and improved shelf-lining paper promised to be "white, replaceable, multi-use coated paper." And that description sounded as though it could have been applied to freezer paper.

There was one box with a loose end, which we loosened a bit more to check out the paper. It was, indeed, freezer paper masquerading as something else!

I bought one roll of it and tried a stencil this afternoon. That's it up there. I think that I may be an addict, although it makes me sad that shelf-liner stencils are one-offs. I want to reuse them. But I'm still on the hunt for other images to use for future stencils.

If you'd like to see more, there's a flickr group dedicated to freezer paper stencils.

If you'd like to give it a go yourself, Craftster has a now pictureless tutorial.