frugal underground

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Photo by JonDays

Do you like to take road trips with your family? Does anyone ever complain about their neck hurting? I’m sure that you have seen those comfortable-looking neck pillows that are made for travel. If not, I should tell you that they can be a bit expensive for a pillow. Here is a way that you can provide some comfort without spending the extra money on the luxury.

Use the material from old clothing as the outside of the pillow. Sew the sides into the shape of a pillow, but be sure to leave a whole open to stuff the pillow. You can shape it to be a square, rectangle, or the U shape that neck pillows come in. You can also add a zipper, or use the zipper from the item of clothing you are using, so you can empty it for a wash in the machine.

You can use other pieces of old clothing, rice, collections of lint from the dryer, beans, or cotton balls to fill the pillows.

Once the pillow is stuffed to your liking, seal the opening.

That’s all there is to it. Be creative. It is a fun and easy project!

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You might be throwing away things that you could use again. There are plenty of created ways to make treasure out of your trash. Here are a few ideas:

Use your old mustard or ketchup squeeze bottles as a cake decorating tube.

Use a cardboard box and manila folders for a filing system.

Give the stuffing paper from purses, book-bags or shoes to the kids for drawing paper.

Photo by HagitR

You can use a shoe box as a place to keep your incoming mail.

Keep old book bags, as long as they don’t have holes. You can use them for day trips, or a flight carry-on.

Use paper and plastic bags from the grocery store as garbage bags. You can also reuse the bags to carry new groceries. (Some stores will give you a $0.02 credit for each reused bag.)

Use the Styrofoam from packages to create a model size snow town for your kids’ little toy characters.

The possibilities are endless! Be creative!

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Have a sewing machine or access to one? I’ve just posted a tutorial on Crafty Geek called “How to make a rice bag”. The supplies are just a hand towel (check the dollar store), 5 pounds of rice, and a little bit of thread, so it’s extremely affordable, and it’s a great gift (especially for people who are always cold) because they add comfort to the recipient’s life.

Edit: My Crafty Geek site has gone down (I am consolidating hosting right now), but you can see the Wayback Internet Machine’s copy of the rice bag tutorial in the meantime.

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As I mentioned on my Ten Dollar Verdict post, I’m launching a new blog. I’ve decided to focus it on the generic topic of crafts, and since I’m a geek, here it is: Crafty Geek. It’s very much still in launch stage, as it only has one post, but that will be increasing shortly.

I was going to make it just be about knitting, but I realized that, given my gnat-like attention span, I’d be better off going with something that will be relevant when I hop to stenciling or beading or whatever random crafty thing will come next (actually, it will probably be crocheting). The individual posts will focus on specific projects, products, craft disciplines, etc., so the ads will still be targetted and relevant, and the back posts will come up in Google for specific searches.

With my first $30 in revenue specifically from Crafty Geek, I’m going to launch the review site I mentioned.

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