Holder for ceramic mugs

[dbuster]

We occasionally pick up some interesting coffee mugs as souvenirs in places we've visited. We've always just brought 'em home with us and put 'em in our house's kitchen cabinets because we didn't want 'em rattling around and breaking in our trailer while we're on the road. But I've come up with a way to keep the mugs safely in their place while traveling.

I got a 3/4-inch-thick (1/2-inch would have been even better) piece of that foam used in flower arranging and cut it to fit on the bottom of a cabinet. Then, I traced around the bottoms of standard-size ceramic mugs (3.25-3.5-inch diameter seems most common), traced a little notch for the handles and cut 'em out with a small pocket knife blade. The foam fits neatly on the bottom of the cabinet, and the mugs are going nowhere til I'm ready for some coffee.

We elected to set the mugs into the foam right-side-up on the theory that no mouse would dare invade this cabinet, but you could just as easily set the mugs in upside down. Most ceramic mugs are pretty much straight up and down so there's little, if any, variation in the top and bottom diameters. And we have found that mug-makers seem to set the handles on the mugs about equidistant from top and bottom.

[hockeyfam]

Nice! I've hesitated to bring my tea cups because I didn't want to deal with the possibility of them breaking. I don't mind the disposable mugs but I feel bad causing extra trash!