If you’ve been looking for a manual can opener that works — quickly and easily, without hurting your hands — take a peek at the rather pompously named Kuhn Rikon Auto Safety Master Opener. Carol just got one and she has been raving about it.

Carol’s super-hard to please when it comes to can openers, and rightly so because
(a) she’s got arthritis in her hands (young as she is; it’s a genetic thing, sadly); and
(b) she has a couple of pre-teen kids with tiny hands who like to help out in the kitchen.

If you can get past the name — and maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t Kuhn Rikon Auto Safety Master Opener sounds like a gadget that Wile E. Coyote would order from Acme in the old Saturday morning cartoons? — you’ve gotta like the idea of being able to open can lids without touching the edge, especially since those sharp metal edges on food cans (or pull-tab cans, too, sometimes) can be a real hazard for children.

Safe, ergonomic and just plain cool.

The Swiss are famous for packing multiple tools into a single package. The Kuhn Rikon Auto Safety Master Opener has all the features of the Kuhn Rikon Auto Safety LidLifter can openers. It is now possible to open a can and never, ever touch the lid. … The tool cuts from the side leaving a rim smooth, not sharp or jagged. … Safe, ergonomic and just plain cool. Plus, it makes quick work of opening bottles and cans with pull and pop tabs, threaded caps and flip tops.

I have to admit to being tempted, though I’m not totally unhappy with the OXO Good Grips Can Opener I’ve been using since about the dawn of time. The nice fat handle is pretty easy on the fingers, but my old clunker doesn’t always cut a nice smooth (safe!) edge when I try to open a really tough can.

Why not an electric can opener?
You may well ask.

Here’s our thinking: It’s one more energy-sucking device to put pennies on our home power bill, one more appliance to clutter up the kitchen counter (or have to pull out and put away again every time you want to use it), and what are you going to do in an emergency situation, if the electricity goes out and you want to open up a nice nutritious can of luncheon meat to keep body and soul together?

Nah, I’ll take a manual can opener, thanks.

Bonus Tip for Bargain Hunters

This particular Kuhn Rikon super-fabuloso can opener comes in your choice of three colours: green, blue, and red. $19.99 the each. But right now on Amazon you can get the red one for $15.95. It’s exactly the same can opener with all the same features except in a different colour — but it’s a lower price!

This “bargain hunter’s secret” can apply not just for can openers, by the way, but often for all kinds of products you may need. Credit goes to DJ for pointing this out to me, a short time back, when he was shopping for a electronic toy. For the particular make and model he wanted, the trendy colours all cost more than the basic black. Since he wanted a black one anyway, that just all the better!

So, remember, if you are flexible about the colour choice, you can quite often get an extra good deal on all kinds of stuff. Look around, you’ll see!

Two cheap products with incredibly stupid names have just made yard work a lot easier, and I couldn’t be more delighted.

See, my garden tools are good quality — every garden guru will tell you that’s important — but they’re geting old. (Aren’t we all?) And I have to confess that I’ve never cared for my tools the way all the gardening books say you should. Sharpen the blades, oil the wood, lubricate the moving parts, clean off the mud after using them, store away carefully in a dry place to prevent rust… frankly, who has time for all that?

Particularly at the end of a hot day’s labour, when all you want is a long refreshing shower and some sort of beverage….

As it turns out, however, a bit of time put into proper garden tool care will actually save time (and effort, and unladylike language) later on.

Okay, really I did know that…

But the whole tool-sharpening business is just too difficult and time-consuming (whetstone? grinder? file? what?) — or too expensive, if you tote the tools to the place you get your lawnmower fixed or a full-service hardware store for sharpening.

The Easy Way to Make Old Garden Tools Work Better

Let me introduce you to Jig-a-Loo and the Samurai Shark.

I told you, these products have incredibly stupid names. One sounds like something you’d see advertised on a late-night TV shopping channel, or in a third-rate Ninja movie. And the other one sounds, well, just plain rude…

But don’t be fooled. These two are my new best friends!

They’re cheap, and they work, and you can grab them both at Amazon.com if your local hardware store doesn’t have them in stock.

Here’s the scoop:

Jig-a-Loo is a silicone-based lubricant spray that goes on clear and dries fast. It has a sharp unpleasant solvent-type odour when you first spray it, but that goes away almost immediately. Use it to loosen rusted-together nuts and bolts, fix squeaky doors and sticky locks, lubricate the moving parts of things (like the sliding window in my back door, or the handles of my ancient garden shears) so they move more smoothly and easily…

In short, it’s a great substitute for a spray can of WD-40, the home handyman’s traditional all-purpose lubricant. But Jig-a-Loo doesn’t have any grease or oil, so it’s not going to add to your cleaning problems. And you can use it on leather, wood, metal, and most plastics and fabric. Oh, and it repells water, too — if they could train the little orange can to put itself away in the cupboard when I’m done with it, that would be perfect.

Samurai Shark — I almost can’t say that with a straight face! — is not much more than a plastic handle with a couple of blades and a knob or two to adjust them with. Fortunately, it has two things going for it:

1. it is cheap, and
2. it works.

Sharpen anything from your dainty embroidery scissors to hefty lawnmower blades with this tool, including those serrated paring knives that the knife-sharpening kiosk guy won’t even look at.

It’s remarkable how much easier those heavy garden chores become when you’re not fighting to chop through sod or to divide perennial plants with a dull spade. Simply astonishing. And believe me, both your arms and your shrubs will appreciate it if you prune with sharp secateurs instead of hacking through the branches with a dull blade.

The first day with my Samurai Shark, I rounded up all the garden tools and sat on the back verandah in the sunshine. I spread out the instruction leaflet beside me, weighted it down with a coffee cup, and worked my way through the pile of tools.

The instructions are needed (but be warned, the print is really tiny! — thankfully, there are also pictures) because this is not intuitive. Each kind of knife or blade will need to be sharpened in a particular way, using one or the other of the Shark’s two built-in blades. It definitely takes a few minutes to get the hang of it, especially if you’re not exactly in the habit of sharpening garden tools…

And then I sprayed all the nuts and bolts that hold together the blades of the shears and pruners and loppers and secateurs and scissors with Jig-a-Loo. Just one complaint there, which also applies to good ol’ WD40 as well as Jig-a-Loo — I can never keep the little straw in the nozzle for more than one spritz.

(What do you think, am I spraying with too much enthusiasm? Anyone know a good trick for this?)

The rest of the afternoon, I dashed about the yard doing all the garden chores I’d been putting off — trimming the long grass around the base of trees with my newly sharp-and-lubricated old garden shears, pruning the hydrangea with secateurs as sharp and smooth-moving as the day I got them, and generally being more productive in far less time than usual.

And now that it’s getting on for the season where a lot of the perennial plants in the flower beds need to be lifted and divided, I can face the task with a little more energy (I’ve been doing those darned pushups, after all, eh?) and with garden tools that work for me, not fight against me!

Craft projects or decor, wardrobe planning, website design, or even landscape and garden planning — whatever you create, much of your success will depend on an attractive colour palette that has balance and harmony.

There are lots of fun colour scheme tools online, but only one that I count as an essential colour planning utility, coming back to it time and time again for design inspiration — Pic2Color.

Go on…. give it a try!
(opens in pop-up)


What makes Pic2Color different from most color-picking tools is one simple trick. You give it the URL of a picture, or browse your computer for a saved photo, or just let the tool pick one at random and see what happens…. Pic2Color will create a colour scheme for you, using the hues of that image.

As you may have gathered by now, I’m all in favour of planning a room arrangement on paper, first, especially when it comes to shoving a heavy armoire around. Scale models or furniture templates are essential to interior design. But life-sized templates? That’s a new one on me!

I haven’t had a chance to try out samples yet, mind you, so can’t give a review based on firsthand experience — but the basic idea is certainly a good one.

And, what with the holiday home-makeover season rushing up upon us, I decided just to put the word out about the DIY site and let you explore for yourself!

Here’s what the company has to say about its light-weight, life-sized, reusable templates — and I must say that the first paragraph is totally reading my mind:

“Furniture Templates” From Design Yourself Interiors, Inc.
Are An Affordable And Useful Holiday Gift for Home

New “furniture templates” from Design Yourself Interiors Inc. are the perfect holiday gift for anyone remodeling or moving into a house, condo or apartment. Get a perfect fit for all furniture and fixtures in every room in the house, condo or apartment before making any expensive purchases.

Top interior design firms nationwide have been using DYI templates to accurately plan every room in their clients’ homes — and now these professional, lightweight, life-sized and re-usable “templates” are available to consumers. Great for designing or remodeling the living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathroom, nursery, home office or patio.

DYI templates are the creation of two high-end interior designers turned entrepreneurs — Kathy Wagner and Melody Davidson.

“We are delighted that our DYI templates are now available to consumers and make both an affordable and useful holiday gift,” said Kathy Wagner, co-founder of Design Yourself Interiors, Inc. “For only $30 our DYI templates bring all the expertise of a high-end interior designer into every room in a consumer’s home. Our product will save time, money, and hopefully the heartache that comes with the realization that the wrong piece or size of furniture was purchased.”

European Decor Style meets the Virtual Kitchen —
I won’t waste your time describing all the kitchen planning goodies to be found at ALNO (UK branch), and the slightly different tools at ALNO USA… you’ll want to go play around with them yourself. Some are available for download, so you can plan your kitchen offline, too.

Myself, I just had loads of fun with selecting a kitchen layout and cabinet style, then changing the colors and finishes with the Kitchen Planning Colour Configurator. See, here’s a pretty picture —