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Helpful Hints

Timesaving Tips for Busy Crafters

Household Hints to Give You More Time for Crafting

Laundry Hints

Minimize Bed Sheet Tangles in the Washer

If you load each sheet on one side of (rather than wrapping it around) the agitator, you’ll find that the sheets don’t get tangled up.

No more tug of war to get the sheets out of the machine.

Organizing Bed Sheets

After drying sheets, fold so that they just fit into one of the pillow cases.

Next time you need a set of sheets, just grab one of the sets in a pillow case. No need to hunt for matches.

Folding Fitted Sheets

Can’t get your fitted sheets neatly folded? Put two of the elasticized corners inside the other two elasticized corners.

Put one fist in each of the doubled corners. Bring your hands together so that all four elasticized corners are nested together.

Keeping one fist inside the corners, take one of the folded ends and double the edge down to match the corner. Continue folding.

Lightly Wrinkled Clothing

Rather than getting out the ironing board and iron to touch up lightly wrinkled clothes, toss them in the dryer with a clean damp towel. Let tumble for ten minutes; remove and shake out.

Cleaning Hints

Dirt & Grease on Painted Walls

Cut the crusts from a slice of white bread; roll it into a ball; and rub it over the area it like an eraser.

Clean Your Glass Shower Doors

To clean the glass in your shower easily, apply lemon juice to the glass with a sponge.

Then, take newspaper and wipe the lemon juice off the glass. It will be clean and sparkle with no scrubbing!

Foggy Windshield

Keep a chalkboard eraser in the glove compartment. It works better than a cloth or paper towels.

Animal Hair on Upholstery or Rugs

Put on a rubber glove and rub it across the upholstery. A wrung-out wet towel also works well.

On low nap rugs where the pet hair get tangled in the weave, use a flexible wire dog grooming brush.

Broken Glass

Use a dry cotton ball to pick up little broken pieces of glass. The fibers catch ones you can't see. A wet paper towel works pretty well too.

Flexible Vacuum Hose

To get into tight spots like under the refrigerator, stick an empty paper towel roll or empty gift wrap roll onto your vacuum hose. It can be bent or flattened to get in narrow openings.

Glass Surface Tips

A coffee filter picks up dust and dries your eyeglasses smudge-free without leaving any lint.

Kitchen Hints

Reheat Pizza

Heat up leftover pizza in a non-stick skillet on top of the stove. Set heat to medium low and heat until warm. This keeps the crust crispy and saves energy compared to reheating in the microwave or oven.

Make Canned Frosting go Further

When you use canned cake frosting, whip it with your mixer for a few minutes. By beating air into it, you can double its volume and cut your calories (per serving) in half!

Refresh Bread that Has Gone a Bit Dry

To warm biscuits, pancakes, rolls, bread or muffins that have dried a bit, wrap in a wet paper towel before microwaving. The moisture will transfer to the bread, etc. and make it a fresh as the day you opened it.

Banish Fruit Flies

To get rid of pesky fruit flies, fill a small glass with ½ inch of apple cider vinegar and two drops of dishwashing liquid. Mix well and set out near where the flies are gathering.

They are attracted to the vinegar but get weighted down by the soap which sticks onto their wings.

Get Rid of Ants

Put small piles of cornmeal where you see ants. They eat it but can't digest it; so it kills them. It may take a week or so, but it works and you don't have the worry about pets or small children being harmed.

Measuring Cups

Before you put sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill the cup with hot water. Dump out the water, but don't dry the cup. Next, add your ingredient, such as peanut butter, and it will come out easily.

Easy Baking Clean Up

Lining baking pans makes for quick and easy cleanup: heavy duty aluminum foil for roasts; parchment paper for baking cookies and such.

An added benefit of parchment paper is that your cookies will not burn! Form the aluminum foil around the upside down pan and it will fit perfectly.

Tough Baked-On Food

If you didn’t follow the tip above and are faced with nasty baked-on food, put ¼ cup of dishwasher powder in the pan, fill with hot running water to mix and dissolve the powder, and let sit overnight.

Difficult to Strain Food

To strain used cooking oil or foods that would slip right through your strainer (like couscous or angel hair pasta), line the strainer with a coffee filter.

Save Space and Your Teflon

Stacking Teflon-coated pans can save space but scratch the Teflon. Place coffee filters between the pans.

Outdoor Hints

Newspaper Keeps Weeds Away

After setting in your plants, put layers of wet newspaper around them overlapping as you go. Cover with mulch and forget about weeds. Weeds will get through some gardening plastic; but they can’t get through wet newspapers.

No More Mosquitoes

Place a dryer sheet in your pocket to keep mosquitoes away.

Squirrel Away

To keep squirrels from eating your plants sprinkle the plants with cayenne pepper. The cayenne pepper doesn't hurt the plant; but squirrels won't come near it.

Leave the Sand at the Beach Where it Belongs

Keep a small bottle of baby powder in your beach bag. When you're ready to leave the beach sprinkle yourself and kids with the powder and the sand will slide right off your skin.

Office/Craft Room Hints

Reopening a Sealed Envelope

If you seal an envelope and then realize you forgot to include something, just place your sealed envelope in the freezer for an hour or two.

Voila! It unseals easily.

Recycle Computer Paper

When you’re finished with something printed on one side, don’t toss it. Stack it neatly in a basket or under your printer stand.

When you’re printing anything that doesn’t need to look great, put a few sheets of this paper you saved into the printer’s feed tray to print on the other side.

Recycle Scrap Paper

If you do paper crafting and often cut paper to different sizes, don’t toss the scraps. Save them in a basket or corner of a handy drawer.

Use the scraps as note paper for phone messages, shopping lists, notes for your DH or kids.

Recycle Your “Mistakes”

If you do paper crafting for profit, invariably you will have some pages that don’t turn out just right.

Save them to use the other side for customer proofs. This has an added benefit: if the customer wants to hold onto the proof for any reason, they won’t be able to use it as a freebie.

Organize Your Fabrics

I have a terrible time keeping my fabrics organized. The last time we moved, I sorted them all by type and placed them in clear plastic storage boxes.

The boxes are lined up on one shelf of my craft closet. Should have worked, right? But I never seem able to find the piece I want without dragging all the boxes down and going through every one. Maybe the boxes are too big.

I think I’m going to cull out all the large pieces and go back to the system I had in our last house.

Large pieces of fabric were hung on hangers in a spare closet. I even had a couple of those multi-tier pants hangers. They worked great too.

Cheryl wrote that she stores her fabric in a tall dresser sorted by color. Eva uses shoe organizers – the kind that hang on a closet rod like a garment storage bag. That sounds great for small fabric pieces because the shoe compartments are quite small. And you can see everything at a glance.

So if I hang large pieces on hangers and file small pieces in shoe organizers, do you think that will do it? Does anyone have any other ideas? I’m getting buried in fabric!

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Hi Eileen:

Had an idea for organizing/storing all your fabric.

Leave them as they are in the storage containers but do a swatch card on the end of each one.

If you add a fabric just cut out an inch by inch piece and add to the card. Attach card to the end of the container. Or you can start a fabric sample book.

Magic marker a number on the end of each container.

In a good size binder, keep samples of the fabric listed on heavy card stock with the box number.

Keep the binder with your fabric containers so if you add a fabric to a container you can add it to the book in a couple minutes. Hope this helps.

Shaaron Chambers

Thank you Shaaron. Great Ideas!

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