ToolGirl Mag Ruffman

How to frame stuff cheap

SEE MAG'S HOW-TO VIDEO to master this easy technique!

If you forgot to shop for gifts and you're crabby about it, my dead-easy tin-framing technique will guide you steadily up the Mood Index so that by the time you’re done you’ll not only feel good, you’ll also have some hand-worked gift arte. (We’ll call it ‘arte’ to distinguish it from Art, which is executed by people who know what they’re doing).

Skill Rating:  Easier than falling off a unicycle and way less painful.

Sky-Rail - Totally Cool Storage

Thinking Inside the Box

Hot products from the hardware show

I arrived at the Canadian National Hardware Show with that breathless feeling you get when you’re surrounded by 4000 square feet of zesty hardware goodness. 

The booths were packed with innovative new stuff like the Wovel, a snow shovel that’s permanently mounted on a large wheel so you can move huge loads of snow without activating a single muscle fibre in your lower back. Unusual design, brilliant results.  If you want to be the talk of your neighbourhood this winter, the Wovel would do the trick.  (http://www.wovel.com/)

Still tingly from the Wovel demonstration, I trawled the aisles looking for other scathingly original products. 

I spotted a bespectacled man standing beside a sky-high wall of see-through plastic storage containers.  He looked at me calmly.  Then, as I watched, he put his hand on one of the containers and slowly removed it, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the array. I moved closer.  Then he removed another container.  But the huge pile of storage units didn’t collapse into the empty spaces.  What miracle was this? 

 

Hung Ho

Best Ever Picture Screw

Ever since I re-painted most of the rooms in the house, all of our framed art has been stacked against a wall.  When houseguests come I tell them to look through the pictures and imagine the art hung according to their own taste.  This exercise offers them some control over their experience of visiting my home, whereas being forced to stack firewood just doesn’t.

But since Houseguest Season is officially over (nobody can get up our driveway in the winter), it’s time to hang those paintings.  And this time, I’m going to do it right.  I know what you’re thinking; Why promise what I can’t deliver?  But I’ve got a secret weapon; the Best-Ever Picture Screw.