Every year there seems to be a rush to re-define the dyed Easter Egg. As a result, tons of techniques for dying hard boiled eggs have popped up. For example, as I mentioned last year, there’s natural dye, which is made from kitchen ingredients such as turmeric, beets, and coffee. It looks like this:

Craft pointed me to this tutorial on making a Pysanky, the Ukrainian Easter egg:

Martha Stewart has the brilliantly simple idea of using narrow strips of electrical tape on the eggs before you dye them, which can look like this:

Or this:

Martha Stewart also has these German-Style Paper Cutout Easter Eggs, which look labor intensive, but lovely:

Then there’s these Pearlized Easter Eggs from Better Homes and Gardens use acrylic paint. I am not sure if that is a good idea on an edible product, but it looks pretty:

And finally, there’s this tutorial on making marbled eggs by The Barefoot Kitchen Witch:

Why not try something different this year?

My Little Gems took a $6.50 nightstand:

And turned it into a spiffy kitchen for the kids to play with:

Sharla, who made the play kitchen, says the “sink faucet is an upside down wooden “J” and the hot and cold knobs are little wooden people you can buy from a craft store-painted silver and screwed in so they turn.” She put the curtains on with velcro, got the silver bowel from a thrift store, made the salt and pepper by gluing pieces together from the craft store… lots of clever ideas here.

This is a great use for one of those old ugly nightstands. Every thrift store is full of them.

Here is a boardroom table made from Legos. ABGC Architects made this table for Advertising agency Boys and Girls by clicking together 22,742 pieces–no glue–and putting it under a glass top.

It is totally awesome.

(Image courtesy Otakuchick)

I can’t believe no one has invented a paper towel dispenser that lets you cut off exactly the amount of paper towel you want. Here is how it would work: the dispenser would let you pull out any amount of paper towel, which you would cut with a paper cutter just like you do for butcher paper.

There is a free idea for any of your inventors out there. I will be your first customer.

Paper towels are useful. They serve certain functions that dish rags don’t. For example, I would rather wipe my mouth with a paper towel than a dish rag. I don’t like cleaning a toilet with a dish rag because afterwards, I have this icky rag I have to contend with. I would rather throw away a used paper towel and be done with it.

However, there’s no doubt that paper towels are expensive and bad for the environment. To balance these two issues, I have adopted a system that prolongs the life of my paper towels. As a result, I only buy them once or twice a year.

Here is five tips for saving money on paper towels:

1. Whenever Possible, Use Cloth. Although nothing beats a paper towel for certain circumstances, for most others, dish rags work great. To determine this yourself, try going without paper towels for a week or two and see when you really miss them. Then make a rule to use paper towels only in those situations, and use dish rags the rest of the time.

Incidentally, I don’t buy dish rags, I cut up old clothes or use old washcloths instead.

2. Price Compare. Buying paper towels is surprisingly complicated. There are different numbers of rolls in a package and different amounts of square feet on every roll, so the cheapest price may not be the best deal. The best way to determine what to buy is to compare apples to apples based on the price per square foot. To do this, divide the price by the number of square feet listed on the package. So if a 100 square foot package of paper towels is $5, you would divide $5 by 100 and end up with $.05 per square foot. If you do that with the different packages–the cheapest ones versus the ones on sale, and so on–you will find the lowest price per square foot of paper towel. That is the one to buy.

BUT buying the cheapest brand can backfire. It is true that very cheap paper towels (Walmart’s brand, for example) don’t absorb well, which means you end up using more of them, going through the roll faster, and losing the money you thought you were saving by buying the cheapest price per square foot. Consumer Reports did an test on paper towels and found that Bounty Extra Soft, Walgreens Ultra Quilted, CVS Big Quilts, Kirkland Signature from Costco (which is what I usually use), and Up & Up from Target had the best absorbency. I generally believe in buying the cheapest roll of paper towels unless a brand has proven itself to be bad.

3. Re-Use Paper Towels. Weirdly enough, most paper towels get used at least twice in my house. I find that most paper towels are capable of several uses before they are spent, so after dinner, I snag the paper towels from the table and toss them in a container to re-use. I will re-use a paper towel before I get out a clean dish rag. I figure this saves a little bit of money because dish rags cost money to wash and the paper towel is going into the garbage either way.

If you re-use paper towels, make sure to be sanitary. I re-use paper towels for cleaning only. I would never wipe my mouth with one.

4. Use Smaller Pieces. I have a friend who likes Bounty Select-a-Size paper towels, which lets you tear off smaller pieces of paper towel. She says one roll of that lasts her 2 months. I haven’t done the price comparison on this, but she had a convincing point. Other people cut rolls in half to force themselves to use less. Or you could just tear off smaller pieces.

5. Use Other Alternatives. I recently learned that you can use paper bags to absorb bacon grease. I always have small paper bags around from the store, so I’m going to try this next time I cook bacon. Another common paper towel alternative is to use newspaper to clean windows. I don’t do that, but some people swear by it. I have also heard of people using paper napkins to clean instead of paper towels since they are (supposedly) cheaper. I think your absorbency issue would come to play here–napkins don’t absorb as well, so you would use more of them. Anyway, the point is, examine every use and look for alternatives. There are a surprising number of them when you start looking around.

How do you save money on paper towels?

Instead of buying those biodegradable seedling pots from the hardware store, make your own by starting the seeds in an egg shell. Granny Miller has a how-to on starting seedling indoors, including a guide on turning an egg shell into a pot for seedlings.

To make the pot, she cracked the egg high so there was plenty of space to plant, poked a nail through the bottom to let water out, and added dirt and seeds. Then she stored the eggs in a clear plastic eggshell holder.

When it’s time to plant, all you have to do is pop the eggshell pot in the ground. It will break down on its own. The eggshells will probably even enrich the soil.

I think this Ms. Ward wallpaper from Grow House Grow is just awesome. It is inspired by Mary Ward, a self-taught entomologist from Ireland in the 1800s. She wrote a series of books on insects, one of which–A World of Wonders Revealed by the Microscope (1858)–was reprinted eight times.

If I were going to put wallpaper in the house, this pattern would be at the top of the list. (Via Design Sponge)

Here’s an adorable way to decorate for Easter–Peeps Bunny Bunting. Dana from Made created these buntings shaped like Marshmallow Peeps to cheer up your Easter celebration or baby shower.

Normally, I don’t see the point of making decorations like these because they take up so much time and other kinds of decorations–streamers, ribbons, etc.–are so cheap. But the buntings are so cute that I would make an exception.

If you are interested in making your own Peeps bunting, check out the tutorial on the V and Co. blog. (Via Craft.)

When we moved in to this house, we pulled a white cabinet from the bathroom that we didn’t want anymore. I was going to sell it on Craigslist, but then we had a better idea. With a few alterations, we turned the bathroom cabinet into a brooder for my baby chickens.

First, my husband put in a removable floor on the cabinet. It can be popped out of the brooder for easy cleaning. Then he made a window for the chicks by cutting a square rectangle in one wall and attaching a 4″ roll of hardware cloth (the screen) to it with a staple gun.

That was all there was to it. We added newspaper to the bottom as lining, a water bottle, and baby chick mash that we bought at the feedstore. And finally, we put in our two baby chicks, Lucy and Penny.

Baby chickens need warmth. According to this site, you “start with 90-100 degrees F the first week. Then, lower down temperature by 5 degrees every week until the chicks have feathers that will protect them.” We tried putting a light bulb in the brooder, but it seemed unsafe, so we decided to use a space heater to heat the room to the temperature they need. The heater’s thermostat keeps the room from getting too cold. We also put the heater beside the brooder so that some of the heat goes into the box with the chicks.

So far, the chicks seem happy. We got them on Friday and they have already grown about a half inch and are starting to develop pin feathers on their wings. We must be doing something right.

After the chickens outgrow the brooder, we will recycle the cabinet again by turning it into a seed starter for next year’s plants. I guess I want to see how many babies can I put inside of one old bathroom cabinet.

Lucy

Penny

Here is Padme Lakshmi, the model/host of Top Chef, on the only part of her house tour I liked–her indoor swing. It would be great to have a swing inside the house, especially since it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can take it down when you’re tired of it.

Here’s a how-to on how to build an indoor swing. It looks child sized, but why? Adults like swings too.

Or better yet, put a porch swing indoors, like this guy did.

Super romantic. And putting in a porch swing could be a cool–and cheap–alternative to a couch. Better than a futon, that’s for sure.

While this is way beyond my knitting skill level, I am impressed with this sweater by the Happy Seamstress of the original Mario Brothers game. According to the site, she “converted a screenshot of Level 1-1 from the original NES Mario Bros. game into a ginormous knitting chart made up of over 10 sheets of tabloid paper taped together, which I used to make a sweater vest for my video game-loving husband.” She even went so far as to dye the yarn the right shade of green.

On top of that, Happy Seamstress is offering a free pattern of the sweater so you can knit one for the geek in your life too. Very cool.