The Creative Way To Upcycle Those Tiny Cracker Barrel Syrup Bottles

There's something so appealing about miniatures. A perfectly normal item, like a bottle of syrup, somehow becomes inexplicably adorable when shrunk down to a fraction of its size. So if you've ever been tempted to take home some of those teeny-tiny bottles Cracker Barrel uses to serve its pancake syrup, but didn't know what to do with them (besides letting your Barbies play "country-style diner"), look no further. Sarah Tereskini, a TikToker who posts clever upcycle and craft ideas on her page redeux_style, came up with a use that's fairly easy to execute and totally practical — salt and pepper shakers.

Chances are, those little bottles served with breakfast at Cracker Barrel are getting thrown away after your meal anyway, so there's no harm in snatching them up and repurposing them. In addition to basic salt and pepper, Tereskini also suggests filling them with customized seasoned salts or homemade spice blends. This gives you a chance to really personalize them and make a nice hostess or housewarming gift.

Tereskini's relatively simple DIY involves drilling holes into the plastic bottle caps, so you will need to get your hands on a power drill. Apart from that, though, you don't need any special tools or components — just some painter's tape and dish soap.

Naturally, the first thing you're going to need to do is clean the bottles thoroughly to eliminate any sticky syrup residue and remove the labels, then sit them out to dry. Remove the plastic ring that once sealed the cap shut — you don't need it for this. Take the caps and once they're dry, Tereskini advises viewers to put a piece of painter's tape over the top of each bottle cap. This, she says, helps the drilled holes come out "cleaner," without any ragged plastic edges.

Through the tape, you're going to pierce the caps with a 19/64 drill bit. Tereskini put three holes in the cap for the pepper shaker and five for the salt or seasoned salt shaker, configured like the three-dot and five-dot sides of a die. After drilling, discard the painter's tape.

Once the bottles are dry (a process you can speed along using a hair dryer, per Tereskini's suggestion), then pour your seasonings into them. You can use an actual funnel if you have a small one on hand, but in her video Tereskini just uses her free hand as a makeshift funnel, curling it into a not-quite-closed fist. Then screw the caps back on, et voilà — you have your miniature salt and pepper shakers.

About that plastic ring you removed from the bottle earlier: You can simply discard it, or as Tereskini does, use it as a bread tag to seal the open end of a plastic bag of bread. She finds them to be more secure than the standard bread tags that typically come on bagged loaves of bread.

But of course, there's plenty else to be done with the bottles themselves. Tereskini isn't the only creator to come up with a way to reuse them: Other crafters have used them to hold small amounts of liquid (why let an almost-empty full-sized bottle of vinegar take up precious cabinet space?), or as miniature flower vases for dainty little blooms. You can use them to hold homemade bitters or syrups for cocktails, or to save a little bit of sand as a souvenir from your beach vacation. You can even use them to create intricate works of glass art. The only limit, really, is your imagination.