The salt and pepper shakers were a little different to model. I am not sure I did it most efficiently. I did it the way I knew I could make it work.
What I knew I wanted was to have holes on the top. Actual holes, not just a texture of them. Of course that all by itself would have been a challenge since I have not ventured near UV maps yet. Back to my holes.
I figured out that if I used small square shaped cavities and did not add extra edge loops then I should be able to get round looking holes.
Because I wanted to use square shapes on the top I decided using a cylinder would not work very well for me. Instead I created a tall box. By using the box I could add edge loops so that I had the spaces for the holes on top and the I could extruded them into the object.
This all actually worked out pretty well for the most part. It got me the holes I wanted when I applied the turbosmooth modifier. Unfortunately it left the objects still relatively square shaped instead of round. As a result, to get that worked out, I spent quite a bit of time tweaking and fiddling with some of the edges to move them around enough to make the objects rounder.
As much time as I spent on the tweaking, I was smart about it and only did it to one of the shakers. I created the one block and did all the modeling right up to being ready to create my holes on top. Once everything else was done then I copied the item. For the holes on top I went with a concept that I have seen in real life and that is, that the only thing that differentiates the salt from the pepper, as far as the shakers are concerned is the number of holes in the top.
So here are the salt and pepper shakers without texture.
And here they are once I decided on a texture for them. As you can see, I also changed the material for the candle holder.