How I wish I had ideas as creative as these when we were tasked to recycle junk into something useful back in grade school*:



A vinyl record fruit bowl, a motherboard cd case, a vinyl record cover bag, scrabble-block cufflinks, and a telephone cord bowl. Of course, back then the items these are made of weren’t junk at all. In fact, a motherboard was a rare commodity, if it even existed in the Philippines at all, in the early DOS system 80s.

I remember blogging about it years ago but, here again are the instructions on how to make a vinyl record fruit bowl.

*So what was my recycled project? A pencil holder made out of an evaporated milk can wrapped with a randomly-ripped Panorama mag cover which I then coated later with clear nail polish. It was such a no-brainer; about 90% of my classmates did the same thing using different objects.

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Arn and I have been living here in QC for a year now and our house, which used to belong to my late aunt, is slowly evolving to suit our needs and personalities. Not exactly DIY (since we hired a carpenter) but here are samples of cost-cutting renovating techniques.

Remember how we installed shelves almost everywhere last year?


The top row shows before and after shots of the staircase landing which we turned into a library/sitting room. The bottom shows how our office looked before we had shelves and a built-in computer desk unit installed. Surprisingly, these didn’t cost too much: materials + plywood + carpenter’s fee for a week’s work = less than P5k for everything, tadah! At furniture shops, the same amount will only buy you a coffee table.

This year, since our combined collection of CDs and casettes are already running out our ears, we had more shelves built in the hallway leading to the office.



So now, instead of being piled up unused in what we call our “box room”, the most-played CDs are in the living room in prefab towers and the rest are in storage in the hallway. Again this didn’t cost too much: plywood (P700) + carpenter’s fee (P400/day) + miscellaneous materials = about P2k

More next time.

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Shucks, and I thought Martha was a goddess for coming up with her neat-o shirt-folding technique. I’ve been employing it ever since seeing her demonstrate it on the Today Show. It turns out that the technique originated in Japan.


Indeed it makes sense, origami has been part of Japanese culture for ages. By the way, these stills werenabbed from the really enjoyable demo video. Turn up your speakers now!

Here’s how to do it:
a. Lay the shirt flat on a work surface.
b. Pinch the shirt on the side opposite you at two points, the (1) shoulder midway between the sleeve and neck and (2) halfway down the shirt, parallel with your other hand.
c. Still holding the two points, cross your right hand over your left, bringing the shoulder down to meet the shirt’s bottm hem and grab the hem with the finger that crossed over (without letting go of the first pinch).
d. Lift the shirt , uncross your arms without letting go and pull the fold. The shirt will (amazingly) do a flip.
e. Lay down the sleeve on your work surface.
f. Fold it over to reveal a neatly folded shirt.

The directions sound complicated but trust me, it only takes about 3 seconds to do per shirt! I’ve never folded laundry any other way after learning of this technique. (If my instructions aren’t clear, you can always view the Japanese lady’s demo. It’s much more fun that way too!)

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