Today, our products are featured on the fabulous, fun lifestyle blog Life With Rosie!

Chelsie made a pretty fantastic summertime beverage and used our caddy, lids, and straws to take it to the next level!

(Photo courtesy of Life With Rosie)

Check out her recipe here!

Aren’t Chelsie and her pup totally adorable?

(Photo courtesy of Life With Rosie)

In our house, we have all sorts of Mason jar lids (obviously!), including decorative lids, storage lids, straw hole lids, etc. The one common problem among all these Mason jar lids is that very few are leak-proof. I’ve often wanted to store a jar in my fridge on its side due to space constraints, but if there’s any liquid in the jar, I can’t! Another concern is that many of the fun decorative lids on the market aren’t food safe. This is fine if you want to use them strictly for decoration, but what if you want to keep candy or nuts, for example, in a jar with a fun lid (like this), but it doesn’t have a food safe liner?

We have a solution! Ryan recently designed these awesome regular mouth silicone sealing lid liners to deal with leaking and non-food safe lids. We’ve been testing them like crazy, and they work wonders!

Here are just a few uses we’ve come up with:

Make your straw lid totally leak proof! Want to transport your jar and straw lid without worrying about any leaking? Stick a lid liner inside until you’re ready to drink it!

Make any storage lid leak proof! For example, the handy white plastic lids sold by Ball aren’t leak proof, but these inserts fix that! Bring lunch to work in a Mason jar without worrying about any spillage in your brief case or back pack! Go ahead, stick that jar on its side in your fridge! It won’t leak!

Make a decorative lid food safe! We love mixed nuts in our home, and we always have a jar (or three) on our kitchen counter. Since these jars are always out and visible, we want them to look extra cute. We love being able to use our decorative storage lids, which, with a lid liner, are totally food safe!

Want to win a 10 pack for yourself? Check out the Rafflecopter below to enter! Winner will be announced on Thursday, July 16.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

REMINDER: Don’t forget to enter our other big giveaway! You have through Tuesday, July 14! Enter HERE!

We hope you’re all having a fun and relaxing summer! We’ve been loving warm nights in the yard with cool drinks from our Mason jars (plus straws and lids, of course)!

It’s time for a giveaway! Check out our rafflecopter below to enter to win a surprise Mason jar accessory package valued at over $50! We’re giving you several opportunities to get contest entries, and the more entries you get, the better your chance to win! (That probably goes without saying, huh?) Good luck! Contest ends at midnight on Tuesday, July 14.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Today’s post comes from my mom, Rita. She posted this to her Facebook page yesterday, and I thought it might make a helpful blog post for all you gardeners out there, so here it is! (Thanks, mom!)

An everyday miracle: The sun, the rain, a seed, and some earth will make a nice lunch for you! This garden has had no human care since early April, when I put a few seeds in the ground. Before the planters, this area was mulched with wood chips, which is probably why, upon closer inspection, I noticed an abundance of Roly Poly bugs. According to the internet, the lowly Roly Poly is a gill-breathing crustacean … a humble (very humble) cousin to the tastey lobster. Since the early-bearing plants , such as spinach and snow peas, are ready to pick and eat, I wanted to stay with organic solutions. Also according to the internet, diatomaceous earth, a fine powder made from tiny fossilized algae-like plants, serves as a repellant. Who would have guessed? Ryan had some! So, he gave me a jarful along with a daisy lid (usually to put a straw into for a cute drink container) and I sprinkled it around my plants. Mason Jar Lifestyle, indeed!

My husband and I love cooking, and we especially enjoy creating our own recipes using items we already have in our fridge and pantry. Today, we started out just wanting to make a sour cream dip for the 4th of July. In our typical fashion (things always get more complicated than they need to be) we decided to each make one and have a competition to see who could create the tastier dip using ingredients we already had. I made mine first, but I didn’t take any photos of the process. Mine contained fresh garden chives, homemade sriracha, black pepper, dried onion, garlic powder, and salt. Ryan decided to go a different direction, using soy sauce, green chiles, garlic powder, and Worcestershire sauce.

He started with a spoonful of sour cream.

Then came the green chiles.

After that, in went a few shakes of garlic powder.

Next, there was a most generous glug of Worcestershire followed by soy sauce.

He stirred it all up, added a bunch more sour cream, and stirred it some more!

This is where it gets really exciting for me. We got to use our super fun neck clip card holders to label the jar! These things are so handy and cute! They pop right on the jar, and you can stick any card or paper in the clip and write whatever you wish! I had a fun piece of blue cardstock and just used a white bistro marker to write on it!

OK, you’re not going to believe it, but it gets even better (of course, keep in mind that I’m a total Mason jar geek fanatic). Our silver storage lids screw on over the neck clips (see picture), so once we had this all ready to go, we just popped a storage lid on top and stuck the whole shebang in the fridge for tomorrow!

Seriously, how cute will it be to serve our dips out of Mason jars? And if we have leftovers, we’ll stick a metal storage lid on top, pop the whole thing back in the fridge, and have a dip to munch on for the rest of the week! And, in the entire process, we used ONE dish!

Shout out to all the fathers out there today! Our kiddos made sweet handprint art for Ryan at preschool earlier this week. Our littlest is only 8-months, so he was happily smearing sweet potatoes all over his face as our other two were ever-so-proudly presenting daddy with their gifts. It melted my heart to see how pleased they were to give him their presents. We also got him a handmade ceramic cup and a bottle of chipotle hot sauce from a craft fair yesterday. Lest you think we didn’t fit Mason jars into the morning, daddy is currently having a drink from a Mason jar. Soon, we’re off for a family walk (where we will bring our standard water-filled Mason jars with drinking lids). What a lovely day!

Mason jars (and fun Mason jar accessories) make everything better, don’t they?

We’ve gotten so many questions about our business — what it is, why we started it, etc. I decided to make a video that pretty much sums it all up (I don’t have any experience in front of a video camera, so please excuse my dorkiness).

If you don’t want to watch a video, I’ll sum it all up for you here:

Basically, all Mason jars come in either regular mouth or wide mouth sizes. Sometimes, this will be indicated on the jar, but not always. The store packaging, however, will always say “regular” or “wide mouth.” The inner diameter for a regular mouth Mason jar is 2 3⁄8″, while the inner diameter for a wide mouth Mason jar is 3″. What this means is that any regular mouth lid will fit on any regular mouth jar, and any wide mouth lid will fit on any wide mouth jar! And this is exactly what sparked the idea for the Mason Jar Lifestyle!

With three kids, our house is filled to the brim with stuff. About a year ago, Ryan (my husband and co-founder of Mason Jar Lifestyle) started getting interested in fermentation and canning, so our house saw an influx of Mason jars. “These are so cute! I want them in every size!” I thought. But we already had too much stuff. Then it occurred to me that we could probably eliminate the need to have cupboards full of all this other “stuff” if we could figure out a way to use Mason jars for pretty much everything, since one jar, with the right Mason jar accessory, could function in countless ways. And, so, our business was born!

How awesome is it that you can use one accessory or lid on any sized jar? Take a straw hole lid (which you’ll find tons of in our shop!), for example — you stick it on a quart jar for your morning smoothie and then use that same lid for your kid’s half pint glass of milk at dinnertime! Then, when they inevitably don’t finish the milk (if they’re like our kids), put a regular storage lid on the jar and stick it in the fridge for the next morning.

Got a giant bouquet of flowers (woohoo!!!)? Grab a flower arranging lid (yes, we carry these), stick it on a quart-sized jar, and you’re good to go! Did your four-year-old surprise you by picking a few flowers from your garden? Put the same flower arranging lid on a pint jar, and make a cute little display-worthy arrangement.

At the end of the day, Mason jars allow you to live a “green” and simplified life without sacrificing style. In fact, Mason jars (and Mason jar accessories) are totally in style and, we think, can take most anything to the next level. Use Mason jars at your next party, and you’ve got your decorations covered! Give your next gift in a Mason jar (we have labels and lids to make them “pop”!), and you’re not only giving what’s inside — the Mason jar itself is an added gift!

Our goal is to give you a really fun and easy shopping experience and to supply you with helpful information on all the ways that Mason jars can add style and convenience to your everyday lives! If you ever have any questions, suggestions, or product ideas, we would absolutely love to hear from you! Please drop us a line: maggie@masonjarlifestyle.com

Thanks for reading, and we truly appreciate your support as we launch our business! Check back often — we have new products arriving all the time!

Tonight’s post comes from one of my very best friends, who I’ve always admired for her ingenuity and creativity. It was a no-brainer to ask her to contribute this blog. Without further ado, heeeeeere’s Hope!

Today I bought a cute little wooden box (it’s hard to tell the size of the box in the picture, but it is small) and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. It was such a deal that I couldn’t pass it up, but I didn’t have a plan for it. It didn’t take me long to realize that the box was the perfect size for post-it notes and since I just finished a built in desk in my dining room, the box would be ideal on the desk top to hold some office necessities. The problem…I needed a jar of some sort to hold pens and pencils.

The jar needed to be tall, but not too big around to fit into the box with the post-its. The answer, of course, was a Mason Jar. To jazz it up, I hot glued a piece of burlap ribbon in an army green and then hot glued an aqua button onto the ribbon. In a matter of minutes, I had a cute jar for holding my office essentials.

Easy peasy and adorable!

About Hope: “My name is Hope and I am a bit of a crazy crafter. I love to take things that other people don’t want and make them into something new. I also really like to use things I already have to decorate instead of buying new. I have a hard time throwing things out sometimes because “I might use it someday”, but I have gotten better and now only keep the essentials (or at least what I think are essential).

The prairie land of North Dakota is my stomping ground. I love the summers in all their glory and tolerate the winters to have my summers again. I am married and have 1 son, who is 13 (gulp!). I am working on my master’s degree in Family and Consumer Science Education with the goal of teaching students about budgeting, cooking, sewing, relationships, child development, and a whole lot of life skills that they will use when they get into the “real world”.

I am looking forward to contributing to Mason Jar Lifestyle and joining my long time friends, Maggie and Ryan, on their new adventure! Oh and here’s a little factoid, I was pretty darn instrumental in getting those 2 crazy kids together. I guess you can add match maker to my list of accomplishments.”