DIY Life

My mom used her ironing board every day when I was a kid. As I got older and she got sicker, I took over the majority of the ironing for her. We wore many holes in the cover of that ole board, and finally, it just became a prop against her bedroom wall. To my surprise, it is still there, looking as gross as ever. it is still usable; all that it needs is a new cover.

Vain and Vapid has a great tutorial; showing us through step by step pictures and directions exactly how to recover an ironing board. You'll need fabric, newspaper, string and quilt batting. Make sure to use batting and fabric that can withstand the heat of the iron.

The hardest part of making your own cover is threading the drawstring through the fabric. Using a safety pin and plenty of patience is the key to getting the drawstring through. Tie a large knot on the end of the string so that you don't ever lose it, if you wash the cover.

Yarn comes in many beautiful colors, weights and textures. Sometimes, you can go to every single craft store and still not find the perfect color that you need. If you are having a difficult time finding the perfect color, you can dye your own with fruit and vegetables.

Fruits and vegetables that stain, such as onion skins, grape juice, and beets make very pretty dye, and yarn dyeing is a fun and easy craft that kids can help with. Lion Brand Yarn has tips and recipes using various fruits and vegetables and wool and cotton yarn. You need stainless steel pots, yarn of course, a timer, tongs to handle the yarn, and of course, a stove. the kids can help with the coloring, but adult supervision is needed around the boiling water.

It is amazing to me how the different yarn produced different color results. I would have loved to see strawberries make the list because I think the color results would be perfect for making baby blankets for a special new baby girl.

Most of us used sleeping bags throughout the summer for various camping trips and overnight adventures. Unless you're going survivor style in the snow, you've packed away your camping gear and brought out your down blankets and warm coats. How you packed away that sleeping bag will make a big difference as to how well it serves you next season.

These instructions for proper sleeping bag maintenance and storage are particularly useful. If you read through and find that you didn't clean your bag thoroughly or don't have it packed away in the best manner then you'll want to dig it out of the closet right away. Take care of those things and pack it away confident that it will be ready when you need it. Here's how your clean and dry bag should be stored:

Just in case you haven't filled your quota this month for things you can do with packing peanuts, here's one more idea that just might do the trick.

My wife has discovered that when it's time to pedicure her toenails, placing packing peanuts in between her toes works better than using cotton balls as toe separators. She finds that while cotton balls tend to fluff out and get in the way of the project, the packing peanuts don't have that fuzz which can get in your way. She also says that the peanuts hold the toes farther apart and that they are easily adjustable, while cotton balls seem to always fall down on the job.

One other measurable advantage to using packing peanuts to wedge apart your toes is that cotton costs money and once you have stuffed it between your toes, you take it out and throw it in the trash. Packing peanuts on the other hand, generally come to us free of charge and in a pinch, you could always wash them after plucking them out from between your toes and reuse them as packing peanuts. I myself, wouldn't recommend that. Not to mention that many varieties of packing peanuts these days are in fact biodegradable.