How to Wrap Unwieldly Gifts

 The fabric and ribbons were from my stash.  My gifts for Mom are usually from the silent auction at our church's fall festival, and they are inevitably weird shapes and big.  I finally wised up and made these cloth gift bags last year.  Much easier, more environmentally friendly, and less fragile than wrapping paper.  Mom gave them back after she opened them, so I can use them again this year. 😊 

Don't Throw Away... Old Calendars

 You can use old calendars as wrapping paper for small gifts.  I like to find a theme and chose a month that matches the recipient.

Video with Life Hacks

Some interesting stuff in this video!

It makes me think I should melt more stuff!

Laundry Life Hack

How to NOT leave laundry moldering in the washing machine OR out on a line all night:

Leave the laundry basket on your bed.  You'll at least remember before you go to sleep!

Life Hack #9: How to get organized without buying anything

Here is the before.

 

The problem?  Lots of wasted space.  Lots of inaccessible items.  General chaos.

I used stacking boxes in order to make better use of the space.  It isn't ideal, but I'm trying to use a space for something that is not intended, so it is inevitably a makeshift solution.

The black box on the lower shelf is empty.  It's used as a riser.

Life Hack: Badly Designed Belt

A Life Hack in Pictures... and no, the belt didn't break.  It came that way...

 In Slow Motion....

Light and Destruction..... Or DIY table lamp from a standing lamp

This past weekend Belovedest and I updated the lighting in the living room.

He is constructive.

He took down the ceiling fan and put up a light fixture.

Next, he turned one of these:

into one of these.

by taking out these sections of the lamp:

This involved cutting and splicing the wire.

(Next up: painting.)

She is destructive:

I took apart the ceiling fan to add to my sell-as-scrap-metal pile, which was a lot of fun.
BEFORE:

AFTER:

Note the box on the right full of metal bits.  There was a fair bit of copper in the motor :)

I'll have to post a picture of the new light fixture....

Life Hack #10: How much does _________ cost me a year?

I wanted to find out the cost of contacts versus glasses by figuring out how long one bottle of contact solution lasts, but you could apply this method to everything from cereal to sticky notes.  Just write the date on the item when you start using it, and then note how long you used it when you threw it away.

Life Hacks Extravaganza!

Here's a link with 89 life hacks!  (My personal favorite is the one with the clothes pin.)  Enjoy!

Life Hack #8: How to Get Candle Wax out of a Glass Container

Did you know you aren't supposed to burn a candle down past half an inch?  (Flip over an unlit candle and look at the warning sticker on the bottom.)  Apparently the glass container can shatter.

Anyway, I wanted to re-use a candle container and found a wiki that suggested putting the candle in the freezer for a couple of hours.  I did and much to my surprise, the wax popped right out when I turned it over. Super easy!

Don't Throw Away.... Empty Kleenex Boxes

They work really well for storing plastic bags:

Life Hack #7: Remembering to....

This is a bracelet made by my rock-hound Grandpa (rest in peace, kindly man) around a milk jug.

It's supposed to help me remember to make my medicine in the morning because the medicine comes in a green box.

It's working more than not having it there would work....  I'm still pretty forgetful, though.

Wedding Present with a Flat Bow ... plus Frugal Gift Wrap

You know how you put a pretty bow on top of a wedding present and then you get to the gift table and there’s no place to put said present without squishing someone else’s pretty bow?

Here’s my solution.  I punched four circles out of one color of wrapping paper, plus one for the center of the daisy out of matching wrapping paper.  (The paper itself had seen better days, but I was able to find non-wrinkled spots.  It’s a good way to re-use wrapping paper that has already been used once.)  Ta-da! A flat but classy bow.  (The card goes inside the gift.)

 

Other frugal aspects:  The wrapping paper is butcher paper from Hobby Lobby.  (Not the best deal in the world for wrapping paper, but better than a $3 roll that's only 10 feet long.) The ribbon is from a VCR tape.

Life Hack #5: Packing Material

Use real peanuts (in the shell) as packing peanuts.  They are pretty cheap, biodegradable, and the recipient can eat them!

From Simply Green Giving, by Danny Seo, page 23.

Life Hack #4: Check Out Your Workout

You know how you get bored with your workout DVD after about three weeks?

That's how long you can check out DVDs from library in my town.  Yup--I've been checking out the DVDs instead of buying them.  Since we are regular library patrons, it's quite convenient.

Right now I'm enjoying Crunch - Fat Burning Dance Party.  It's not that hard, but I'm still panting when I'm done, and it's broken into sections so I can just do twenty minutes, forty minutes, or the whole thing for 60 minutes.  (Yeah.  That hasn't happened.  It's a theoretical possibility.)

The trick is to not get discouraged if you can't keep up or don't get the steps right.  Glory in your own imperfection for a change.

Don't throw away..... Old Phone Books!

The best crafting tip ever!  (I can't remember where I saw this--I only wish it was my idea.  If anyone wants to claim it, click on "no comment" in order to leave a comment.)

When you are doing a project that involves lots of gluing, and you need the glue to completely cover the back of whatever you're gluing, use a phone book. When the page gets sticky and messy, turn to a fresh page.

Life Hack #3: How to Organize Almost Anything

1. Hoard boxes of the same shape and size. 

2. Label said boxes. 

3. Include "catch-all" boxes with labels like "unsorted," "assorted," and "miscellaneous."

Here's the original mess, from my work on the Mosaic Angel:

 
Here are my organizing raw materials (plus some cardstock, not pictured)

Here's the final result:

This trick also works on a large scale, as you can see below. I have lots of fabric and misc. craft materials.  (Yup, I save stuff 'just in case.'  This also means that my husband is a saint.)  It's not pretty, but I can find what I need.

If you are interested in trying to this trick, one type of uniform-sized box that would be easy to accumulate would be cereal boxes.  Just cut off the tops at whatever height you need.  Granted, they would not have lids, but depending on what you're storing and how, that isn't necessarily a problem.

Life Hack #2: How to Fight Less with Your Beloved about Money

Don't you hate it when you are trying to live frugally in order to meet some important and long-cherished financial and personal goals, and your spouse goes out and buys something stupid that he or she plans to use frequently, but that you know perfectly well they will be bored of in a week?  After all, little things add up.

Our solution: allowances.  It sounds a wee bit juvenile, no?  But it is figured into the budget.  And I know as long as we are staying roughly within our budget, we are making financial progress.  So if my husband wants to buy complicated card/board games with too many rules, wizards, odd-ball dice, and creatures called Feral Ferrets, that's OK.  He is probably equally mystified by my spending my entire month allowance on a haircut and eyebrow wax. 

Allowances are done in cash, and can accumulate over time in order to save up for big purchases.  They do not include necessities, and semi necessities, like razors, socks, and getting ice cream together.  (If you're curious, the first gets lumped in with groceries, the second is in the fluid category "J./The Magician’s personal," in the last goes under "entertainment.")  The allowances need not even be the same size.  When we were first married, my allowance was $200 a month, and his was $35.  Now we both get $40 a month, although now we tend to just use allowances for things that we want to get that the other person thinks are silly, whereas before things like clothes used to come out of one's allowance.

Anyway, the upshot is that the other person's spending no longer feels like it's cutting into our financial progress.  We each have the freedom to indulge in those behaviors that make no sense to the other person.  Isn’t part of the adventure of marriage the fact that another person is never really going to make perfect sense?

Life Hack #1: How to Eat Boring Cereal

I started doing this to wean myself off of sugary cereal.  I would combine sugary cereal with one that was a little bit more healthy (Honey Nut Cheerios in combination with regular Cheerios) and over time would gradually shift the ratio from about 50-50 two gradually having less and less Honey Nut Cheerios.  Since our house is now as gluten-free as possible, I am doing the same thing with Chex.  It is the most boring cereal imaginable, and I don't add any sugar to it at all, but by mixing up the flavors it is slightly less boring.

The phrase "life hack" is borrowed from one of my favorite web sites, which is also a good place to start if you are new to the whole frugality movement: http://www.wisebread.com/

Don't Throw Away... Used Chapstick Tubes

This is probably a the most cheapskate thing I have ever done.  It was kind of fun, though.

I have been saving my used chapstick containers for a couple of years because The Magician has been talking about making our own chapstick for a while.  I gathered together all of my chapstick, and just counting Burt's Bees, I had 37 empty tubes.  (You can see why he is interested in making our own since one tube costs $2.99.)  I had discovered, however, in the mad hunt through the house for chapstick, that I had lots of non-Burt's bees tubes of chapstick that could still be used.  So I thought we should go ahead and put off making our own big batch, especially since the supplies were going to come out to about $50.  (This seemed like a lot to me, until my beloved pointed out that those 37 tubes of chapstick had cost $110.63.)

 

So anyway, we decided to melt the chapstick that remained in the tubes and see if we could replenish any of the empty tubes.

First, we removed the labels.