Stack up those glossy magazines you can’t bear to throw out, buckle them down with a pillow on a pale Nordic-ish birch wood base, and voila! you’ve got a dandy designer footstool, or extra seating for a party…

More than mere designer furniture, the Hockenheimer stool (by German design firm NJUStudio) is a personal objet d’art that makes a statement about who you are and your individual style:

National Geographic?

Martha Stewart Living?

Or will you show off your treasured Rolling Stone back issues?

Heck, you can even show off your lifetime subscription to the Wall Street Journal, if that’s your style!

The Hockenheimer stool comes with a stand of birch wood handmade in a youth workshop in Bavaria, custom-made leather straps with buckles and rivets added by hand, and a unique hand-crafted cotton/polyester pillow to top it off.

The wood base comes in two sizes: Magazine style 305mm x 250mm x 70mm (approx. 12″ x 9.8″ x 2.75″); or Newspaper style 415mm x 305mm x 70mm (approx. 16.3″ x 12″ x 2.75″).

Available at Connox with prices starting at € 128.50 (VAT tax included) plus shipping from its home in Germany.

Here’s a cheery eco-alternative to using those nasty plastic bags when you shop for groceries! It’s a sturdy folding box made of woven polyethylene fabric, fully lined, with built-in aluminum carrying handles.

The Shop Box comes in two sizes, made to fit into supermarket trolley. Fold it flat to take to market, then open it up to fill with your purchases and carry the groceries home.

The Camouflage Company does its Shop Box in four designs — Willow, Evergreen (which is sort of an ivy pattern), Long Grass, and Roses and Petals (shown here). You can also get an expandable tray in a matching pattern, to organize the smaller items or flip over to serve as a lid.

As far as I can tell, The Camouflage Company only sells to the UK and parts of Europe, but you’ll be happy to know that Garden Divas will ship Shop Boxes to international customers — just choose your country at their online checkout.

Cheerful and practical, this 6-bin storage unit is perfect for organizing toys, books, and all the other small bits and pieces that have a way of spreading across a child’s bedroom.

The pull-put bins are made of heavy-duty fabric in crayon-bright colors — lilac, yellow, red, fern green, orange and light blue — and fold flat for storage when not in use.

The storage unit is about 24¾’ high x 31¾” wide x 11½” deep, and each of the fabric bins measures 9″ x 9″ x 10½” deep.

From the Restore & Restyle™ Kids Sports collection, $80.99 at Target.

[via Adorable Finds]

Always looking for good ways to pack away the seasonal clothes and bedding when that time rolls around, without taking up every inch of storage space in the house… so this little BagButton gadget caught my eye.

It’s a plastic disk that fits onto the opening of any plastic bag — and we all have plenty of those taking up space, don’t we? — and lets you use any ol’ vacuum cleaner (or a reverse-direction air pump) to suck out the extra air.

I haven’t tried this BagButton for myself, so I can’t vouch for it personally. But it caught my attention because if a $14.95 gadget can help me to cut down on the amount of storage space I need — and also helps to put all those plastic bags to good use once more, before tossing them into the recycling bin — it bound to get a second look…

On the other hand, the BagButton reviews on Amazon don’t look very encouraging, to say the least…

Have you heard of this gadget?
Have you tried it?

I’d love to get your thoughts on this — is the Bag Button a good product that works as advertised, do you know?
 

There are three real advantages to using ice cube trays to organize and store small stuff, as I see it:

1. Ice cube trays are dirt cheap at the dollar store;
2. You can stack ice cube trays so they take up less space;
3. If you run out of ice cube trays in the freezer, with a big party in the works, you can dump your tidbits into a zip-lock baggie and press your storage units into temporary service.

This idea is so elegantly simple and clever, no doubt there are those among you who have been doing it for years — but I got the tip from Buzzing Bee, who read about it in Real Simple magazine recently.

Earrings leap to mind first, here, because anything that is supposed to come in pairs has a nasty habit of one of the pair getting itself lost — but the idea of storing things in ice cube trays could apply equally well to other jewellery, or paperclips and push pins, or postage stamps, or almost anything tiny that you need to keep together in groups…

Tiny stickers for scrapbooking…

Special buttons for special sewing projects — or all the spare buttons that you collect when you buy articles of clothing where the manufacturer has been kind enough to enclose a spare button…

Your secret stash of uncut diamonds…

Empty plastic pails are very likely to be “free for the picking-up” from your local bakery. We arrange to get some of these whenever we need a large food-safe plastic bucket. The ones we get are 30-lb buckets with tight-fitting lids. They happen to be from molasses but they also get shortening and corn syrup and other things in these big pails, so there’s generally no shortage of them.

We keep the senior dog food in one and the puppy food in another, bird seed in another one, and so on. And when we find a really good buy on bulk foods, these pails make great back-of-the-pantry air-tight storage for supplies like powdered milk or flour.

Another couple of the plastic pails are used for storage of holiday decorations. Now we can store our seasonal ornaments and wrapping paper, etc., down in our old unfinished cellar without worrying about mice or insects or water damage.

Because these buckets have a sturdy handle and are quite easy to carry around, I use one in the garden to collect weeds and prunings. Turned upside-down, it makes a dandy garden seat for a little rest between chores, too!

The bakery is happy to give their empty plastic pails away at the end of the week, because otherwise they would just have to throw them out. Since they have to pay to have their dumpster of trash taken away for disposal, they’re happy not to do that. So, getting our storage pails for free is good for the neighbourhood small business owner and good for the environment (keeping waste out of the landfill), as well as good for us!