So here’s what I made today.

Apparently drinking out of mason jars is all the rage with the hipster kids these days. Who knew? (I would have if I’d paid attention to my cousin.) Anyhow, they’re great for home-drinking, and because they have lids, they seem like they’d be great for on-the-go drinking. Not so much, though, because you have to remove the whole lid to drink.

We learned this last week when Ian and I were running out the door for errands, short on time, and we’d neither of us had our coffee, but all the travel mugs seemed to be in various cars. So I poured him a jar of coffee and away we went. And it was very convenient, until he needed to drink from it.

This week, I started thinking about how a mason-jar-drinking friend was all excited about a company making sippy-cup-style lids for mason jars. But they don’t ship to Canada, she lamented.

Okay well, who doesn’t have a few too many sippy-cup-lids sitting around their cupboards nearing the end of their usefulness as their youngest approaches school-age? Well, a lot of non-parents, I suppose. But not me.

Ridiculously simple process, but I’ll break it down a bit.

1. Remove the metal band from the jar, turn it upside down and place the ring over the top of your proposed sippy cup lid. That will let you know if you have the right amount of flat space around the spout in order to fit well with the collar.
2. Flip the lid the other way, so the bottom of the collar is against the plastic lid and start tracing around it with a utility-knife.

I found that it was easiest to get it mostly to size and then keep doing test-fits to see which areas were rubbing or folding worst when I tried to push the plastic lid inside the collar. Then I’d use the utility knife to carefully shave bits off the edges (as you can see from all the plastic bits on the table in the first picture).

I worked slowly and only shaved tiny bits off at a time because I didn’t want it to get so small that it wouldn’t sit on top of the jar edge because then it wouldn’t make a good seal.

Some lids might work better if you use them with a rubber canning ring, but this one seems pretty water-tight so far.

Oh yes, I also used the utility knife to cut out the inside of the spout and used a pin to poke a vent-hole in the top. Like most sippy cups, it throttled the flow of liquid by only having three pinholes and I thought this might be frustrating to most adult users.