Upcycle Living

The year of the snake. What else would you do for a company new year dinner? The snake theme obviously! The cheapskate that I am, there's no way I will go out and buy anything new just for the glory of one evening. I found this old baby blue Ikea fleece blanket that I couldn't part with and an old, rather flattened pillow which I have no idea what to do with; and I decided to make a stuffed snake with it. The process was really simple: mark two identical shapes of a snake on it with a 2B pencil, cut around them with 1-cm space allowance.  Stack the 2 shapes together, place a red ribbon of 4" length on where the mouth is (as the tongue) and stitch along the marked line, leaving about 4" of opening.  Fill it up with the old pillow stuffing, bit by bit. Then stitch up the opening.  As for the patterns on the snake, they were some lace trimming from my craft box. The eyes were buttons from my sister's dress (buttons that she hated and removed so I saved ...

Thanks to Aeon Supermarkets (previously known as Jusco) in Kuala Lumpur, we've learned to reuse those netty foam fruit wrappers as bottle protectors when we buy wine. It's really simple - just pull it over the wine bottle and that's it. It prevent any glass bottles from knocking on each other or on other hard/glass objects in the shopping bag. Very useful tip. And I'm really impressed with Aeon that they actually saved and reused thousands of those fruit wrappers that are otherwise disposed of, at the same time educating their customers. But we don't have to stop just there do we? I have kept quite a few of those wrappers from my shopping trips to Aeon, just to reuse them again and again. And today I've just figured out another possible function for these little darlings. Here's a picture of my suitcase, with the trolley handle extension next to the base of the case. It looks as if it could be broken with just any force from the back. So I took 4 foam fruit ...