Day Tags for the Bread Basket

My alternate title for this post was Living with Synesthesia, but that wouldn’t have made quite as much sense. It’s going to be a little convoluted post, but bear with me.

Remember Mr. E’s preference for sets of things in different colors? I had no idea that when he was a kid, he had a strong connection not only between weekday names and colors, but also month names and (pairs of) colors. We suspect that he is / used to be a synesthete. Apparently the connections aren’t as strong anymore, and some pairings he can’t even remember anymore, so I’m not sure whether we can call him a synesthete anymore. Aaanyway.

What is this synesthesia, then? Synesthesia happens when information from one sense is involuntarily accompanied by a perception in another sense. It sounds like connecting words with certain colors is the most prevalent form of synesthesia, or at least the most talked of form.

And what on earth does synesthesia have to do with our bread basket? Well. Last fall we had some trouble with bread going bad before we managed to eat it. With life just flying by, it was impossible to keep track of how long each loaf or bag of rolls had been around. We wanted to do better, since we hate to waste food.

While brainstorming, one of our ideas was to get some sort of markers or tags to indicate the weekday that a piece of bread was bought / made / taken out of the freezer. Day tags would allow us to quickly see which piece had been around longest and needed eating. I thought you could even use different colors for each day to tell them apart easier, and to cater to Mr. E, of course. It was then that Mr. E told me of his synesthesia. We decided that using his old weekday color scheme…

…would be a great idea.

We got some mini clothes pins at a crafts store. I found a coupon for a 40 % discount. Then I simply wrote the abbreviated weekday names on the clothes pins with permanent markers:

Unfortunately, the yellow for Tuesday tag didn’t show up well enough against the unfinished wood, so I took white acrylic crafts paint and covered one side of the pin with white before re-writing. Voila:

The day tags look quite nice:

We just stick the unused pins on the edge of the basket to keep them close at hand. And the best thing? Both the effort and the cost of the project are minimal:

• Mini clothes pins: $1.90 (with coupon)
• Permanent markers: already owned
• Crafts paint: already owned

Total: $1.90

If I were to do this project again, I’d probably paint one side on all the clothes pins before writing on them so that the letters pop up even more. As it is, they will do just fine. We do love pale wood.

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