How I keep my kitchen towel from falling onto the floor

Binder clips! Great for keeping opened snacks closed,  making clip boards out of notepads, and keeping the kitchen towel from falling off its rack when you dry your hands

Two Easy Steps:

1. Drape kitchen towel over the holder on the oven door.
2. Clip one side of the towel to make it impossible for the towel to slip off.

How to Make Plastic Straw Penguins

Found this scan from the summer of 2005, when I was in Taiwan and a local artist selling plastic straw penguins showed me how he makes them. I wrote up these instructions for our arts and crafts workshop at TAF that year. Click the image to see enlarged version.

How to make recycled paper placemats

For some reason, I still get issues of W magazine from redeeming airline miles a couple years ago. While I should tell them to not send me anymore, I do enjoy their art and thought I would take advantage of the vivid colors of their 10″ x 13″ spreads.

Along the lines of basic, uniform weaving patterns (as illustrated by this WikiHow article), the fun challenge of this is finding the right mix of colors and deciding where to show or hide certain segments of the strip of paper. You might be able to tell where I tried to hide any distinguishing features of the models to create a more uniform texture.

After arranging the strips of paper in the pattern I wanted, I used glue sticks to hold the pieces together and then took book cover laminating paper to seal it. I tried to get the air bubbles out, but it doesn’t work well with so many pieces that weren’t totally flattened. In hindsight, I would recommend trying a hard laminate instead. The pictures above illustrate the pieces before laminating.