My homemade canning jar lid rack for the dishwasher

And here -- because I don't apparently have anything to do -- is a project I've been contemplating a long time, and I finally just gave myself the gift of a half-hour in the basement and made it. 

Behold the canning-jar-lid rack,
sitting happily in the dishwasher,
with canning jar lids along for the ride.

We do a lot of canning jar lid washing, and our dishwasher has no good way to stand them up like plates (does yours?  does anyone's?  no idea).  Apparently, it's possible to buy these racks online, but of course I'm all to-heck-with-buying-stuff, so I thought and thought and thought, and finally came up with this design.  It's inspired both by the existing peg-up structure that the dishwasher already sports so jauntily, and also by the fact that I had a bunch of skinny dowel rods leftover from making soap dish racks last Christmas season. 

When I made this, I got to play with a bunch of my favorite tools:  the cordless drill (so much!), the circular saw to  slice down the base strips, a new orbital sander because -> fun <-, a mallet to pound dowel rod pieces into the holes, and a bolt cutter to snip the dowel rods.  (That last one was not exactly super professional, and it means that the ends of the dowel rods have a crimped appearance, but it's not like gazillions of people are wandering through my kitchen to look at stuff inside my dishwasher, are they?)  The bars along the bottom are held together with really short-snipped dowel-rod pegs.  I like that this is an all-wood thing that is just held together with wood.  

Canners all know that you're not supposed to reuse the metals lids for next year's batch of applesauce or whatever (and then, we confidentially tell you that we reuse them anyway . . . shhhh!).   But the metal lids are perfectly fine for everyday purposes, and the Tattler plastic lids are fine for reusing over and over again in canning projects for decades.    Because of that, and because we use canning jars for storing leftovers, yogurt, butter, pesto, . . . basically, for just about everything . . . we seem to have lots and lots (and lots) of canning jar lids in every load.  

And now, my canning jar lids are upstanding.  yay!