DIY Life

Darling origami gift bags for Halloween treats. A new vlog teaches you how to fold like a pro! – Infarrantly Creative

"The Hostess" shares entertaining ideas for the leafy months of October and November. Inspiration for fabulous fall parties is now at your fingertips. – Hostess with the Mostess

And for your next get-together, here's a recipe to bookmark: delectable (yet easy) cream cheese Danishes. Yum. – Niesz Vintage Fabric

My favorite fortune, read after dinner at a Chinese restaurant, says:

You've got a few friends over on a Friday night. There's good stuff grilling on the barbeque, there's a table full of salads and desserts, there's cold beer in the ... Oh, no!

You forgot to put the beer in the fridge. It's sitting on the porch where you set it down to unlock the door. And it's about 87 degrees out there. You can stick them straight in the freezer, but it'll still be half an hour at least before anyone has a cold brew in their hot little hand. Don't you just wish there was a cooling-down version of the speedy heating-up efficiency of a microwave?

There is! The not-so-dumb folks over at Dumb Little Man have the answer. If you have a container large enough to hold a few bottles, enough ice to cover them, some table salt, and enough room in your fridge for it all, you can have icy-cold beer in about three minutes! Follow the Dumb Little Man link for full details.

For those who need to know, the reason is this: salt speeds up the melting. When a substance goes from solid to liquid, it absorbs extra heat, keeping the water extra cold. So there. Your grade ten physics teacher was right: the subject is relevant to your day-to-day life!

[via Matthew Yglesias]

Along with Spring comes the flurry of kids' birthday parties, concerts in the park, and festivals of every sort. Face painting is part of so many of these festivities. If you think you might get dragged into face painting this spring or summer, you'd better get prepared. Knowing what you're doing will make the difference between a kid who runs to the bathroom in embarrassment, scrubbing his poorly-painted face, and one who doesn't wash their face for a week.

The two most important elements (along with a steady hand and a comfy seat) are the paints and the designs. After the break, I'll tell you what you need to know about each.

Welcome back! In yesterday's Let's get "LOST", we discussed ideas for a themed Lost party. One of the best ideas is to create faux DHARMA Initiative ration labels for party food; today, we'll look at ways to do that. We'll also take a gander at some other cool Lost crafts from around the web, including some genius home-brewed t-shirts.

Creating DHARMA food labels

Image editing programs like Adobe's Photoshop are indeed the way to go if you want to create DHARMA labels for your party food (or your office supplies and toiletries, depending on the level of your fandom). The DHARMA logo itself is a modified feng shui ba-gua.

A while back, InsanelyGreatTees offered printable DHARMA food labels for you to download, but Disney, ABC's parent company, asked them to stop. The PDF has been removed, but you can still take a look at the labels themselves, and be amused by the official-looking stamp on them: "Download removed at the request of the Hanso Foundation". This will give you a good idea of what you're trying to create.

You may also take a look at this photo taken on the set of Lost, where you can clearly see plenty of DHARMA rations; there are further photos in that series. Some good home-made rations can be seen in a photo by Flickr's Sahba, "Sheyda's Dharma Initiative food labels" (and a second, close up photo with the same title).

To go about making your own DHARMA labels, you probably don't need exact duplicates of the labels on food on the show: go for reasonable facsimiles. All labels should be black print on a white ground, with a DHARMA logo and sans-serif text. This is an easy task if you use the right fonts. The rest is just the correct label shape (like a hanging tag, with the corners clipped off the top end) and black lines and outlines (which can be done with pens and a straight edge, if you are unable to draw them in an image editor).

To use a dingbat or symbol font as clip art in an image editing program, simply use characters from the font the way you would use any other text, but change the size. A standard size for text is around 10-14; to change a font to clip art, you can start with 200 or 300, which you'll have to type into the "text size" box (it won't be on your drop-down menu, if there is one). Adjust the size from there until you're satisfied with it. (This process was also described back in my Print Gocco Holiday Card tutorial.)

It turns out that a visible number of us on the writing staff here at DIY Life are obsessed with ABC's Lost: if any posts get written on Thursday nights in the next few months, between watching the show and hanging out on spoiler sites for crumbs of information about what might happen next week, it will be entirely coincidental.

OK, I'm joking... a little. The point is that I don't know anyone who feels lukewarm about the show: it's either devoted love, a combative relationship ("They're driving me crazy! Why do they keep introducing more mysteries?!"), or complete disinterest.

It seems like this anecdotal observation also plays out in a few other places, like in the Craftster community. Please join us after the break for a look at plenty of mostly-recent Lost projects from Craftster and a few other places, with spoilers through Season Three. We have fish biscuits and DHARMA Initiative soda -- don't miss out!

Birthdays, graduations, Friday nights with the gang: eventually, you'll probably wind up at a Karaoke Night. Karaoke can strike fear into the hearts of non-singers: what to sing? HOW to sing? Well, I can't teach you how to sing... at least, not in a blog article. But I can teach you to make it a little easier on yourself the next time Karaoke Night rolls around.

The most important thing to remember: karaoke is more about having the guts to go up there and finish the song than it is about sounding like a professional singer. While there are karaoke-based singing competitions, it's a bonding activity in most countries: silly fun in which a group supports its members as they perform a potentially humiliating activity with aplomb, regardless of how bad they actually are.

Your biggest enemy is not the audience, it's your nerves. Your goal is "to not make a fool out of yourself." That's it, and that's not too hard: the bar of expectations is set low, so "making a fool of yourself" is what happens when you chicken out, not when you sing badly. Still, you probably want to feel confident, and you probably want to sound as good as you're able to.

Tips on song selection, exercises, practice, relaxation, and basic singing follow after the break!