For me it was winding my crochet yarn into a ball and putting the ball into a large (clean) butter bowl with a small hole cut in the lid to thread the yarn through.
It keeps yarn clean , prevents tangeling, escaping and protects it from the cats.
I also keep a 2 gallon size storage bag in my freeze. I empty my ice trays in it once or twice a day so I have plenty of ice even though my freezer usually has room for just 3 trays . I keep a coffee can in the door of the freezer to pour grease/used oil from cooking in, when the can is full it goes out with the next trash run and I start over again with a new can. No spills, no leaks and no icky can sitting on the stove or counter
When Son was young I would buy juice boxes for him to take to school in his lunch. I would freeze the boxes, when packing his lunch I would wrap a folded paper towel around a box and put it in a small ziplock bag. It kept his lunch cool, gave him a cold drink at lunch time and a moist paper towel for clean up. He would put the bag back in his lunch box so I could reuse one for a long time.
I used to shop for groceries on foot. I got tired of having the plastic bag handles cut into my hands, so I got a couple of pieces of garden hose and slit them down one side. I put the bag handles through the slits, and carrying stuff home was much easier.
I am glad you posted that ** 2trew ** My Mom doesn’t go shopping on foot but she has skin that is easily damaged and those bags tear her up, just going from her truck into the building and up seven floors in the elevator makes her arms and hands look like she was beaten with an extra thorny rose bush . She has a small cart but sometimes she has to go nake unplanned stops and the cart is at home.
I hang dry nearly all my clothes. When I moved into my current home I started using the clothesline in summer, but didn’t have any clothes pins (and I hate them - they leave funny marks on shirts). When you put clothes on hangers and hang them on the line, the slightest breeze pushes everything together and nothing gets dry. I bought a light chain (like one would use for a dog) and strung that up instead. Saves time, works slick.
When we used chopsticks, we used to have to wash them by hand rather than put them in the dishwasher. Our silverware basket in our dishwasher has a grid pattern on the sides and on the bottom, but a solid divider in the middle. So if you put chopsticks in vertically, like normal silverware, they fall through the bottom. And you can’t put them in horizontally, because of the divider. However (drumroll, please) we found you can wedge them in diagonally.
I find the dish soap a little harsh, but find if you add a little epsom salt to soften the water, all is gravy.
One of those things that is so obvious that you want to slap your head: If you have a use for grocery bags (small garbage pails, catboxes, poopy diapers, etc) there is no need to buy a specific “bag dispenser.” An empty Kleenex box works just as well, as does an empty baby-wipe container if that’s what you have handy.
My mom was a master of “using things for other things” and I never really appreciated it at the time. I remember one year when I was a kid the feet on my footie pajamas wore out. She managed to fashion nearly identical replacements out of a tablecloth she’d saved because there was a cigarette burn or something on it. They were fuzzy on the inside and everything. Yay mom!
I had twins 4 year ago and it was a pain with all the diapers they produced. So I created a diaper chute that was hooped with an embroidery hoop at the top end. The chute material was a net material that ran from our second floor bathroom window down to a trash can below. After changing the babies, I would open the tiny bathroom window, toss the folded up diapers into the hoop and they would spiral through the airconditioned netted chute into the trash can below.
That was definite ingenuity born out of necessity.
When you make a soup, you want it to stop cooking when you take it off the heat to prevent things like pasta or potatoes in it from overcooking on the residual heat.
Make the soup thicker than you want it by the amount of water in a couple of ice cube trays. When the soup is finished, stir in the ice and the soup will quickly become chilled and stop cooking.
When the bath soap becomes too thin, put it on the sink for hands. When it becomes really thin, lather it up with a fresh bar and squooch them together. Be somewhat careful the first couple of times you bathe, and you will never have to deal with small fragments of soap.
When your vinyl shower curtain becomes covered with soap scum, put it in the washer with very hot water, soap (not soup!) and bleach. Wash on gentle cycle. Take it out at the end of the wash cycle. It is a lot easier than scrubbing.