Tips And Tricks For Cool Kids

So a friend of mine sent this to me and I loved it! I sooo wanted to share it with you.

Hull strawberries easily by using a straw.

Rubbing a walnut over scratches in your furniture will disguise dings and scrapes

 This one is my favorite.Overhaul your linen cupboard, store bed linen sets inside one of their own pillowcases and there will  be no more hunting through piles for a match.          

 Pump up the volume by placing your iPhone or iPod in a bowl.  The concave shape amplifies the music.

Use wire to make a space to store gift wrap rolls against the ceiling, rather than clutter up the floor.

Add this item to your beach bag.  Baby powder gets sand off your skin easily, who knew?

Find tiny lost items like earrings by putting a
stocking over the vacuum hose.

Make an instant cupcake carrier by cutting crosses into a box lid.

Forever losing your bathroom essentials?  Use magnetic strips to store bobby pins, tweezers and clippers, behind a vanity door

Store shoes inside shower caps to stop dirty soles rubbing on your clothes.  And you can find them in just about every hotel.

Bread tags make the perfect cord labels.

Bake cupcakes directly in ice-cream cones, so much more fun and easier for kids to eat.

Install a tension rod to hang your spray bottles.

Turn your muffin pan upside down, bake cookie-dough over the top and voila, you have cookie bowls for fruit or ice-cream.

Freeze Aloe Vera in ice-cube trays for soothing sunburn relief.

Very cool sunburn relief!  

There you have it bloggers! I'm sure you found something helpful among these tips! 

Green To Red Christmas Experiment

So I have three poinsettia plants left over from last Christmas. Their hearty red leaves have, at this point, all turned green and they are thriving. I have them in a sunny window and they have grown to become quite beautiful.

But they are green, and they are poinsettias. Shouldn't they be red?

Now that fall has arrived on our doorsteps and the mums are in pots outside, I have been looking at the poinsettias and wondering if their leaves will turn back to a beautiful, deep red in time for St. Nick in December. So I googled this question to see what to do.

Lots of stuff came up, and what I found was that I just may have caught these beauties in time to make it work. The overall solution was this:

In order to get, or force a poinsettia plant to turn red you must eliminate it's light. The flower formation, key to turning the leaves from green to red, is triggered by periods of darkness. During the day the plant needs bright light to absorb energy for color production, but at night they must not receive any bright light for a minimum of 12 hours.

So what do I do? And is it even worth all the trouble? I could just buy new red ones and be done with it, right? Or I could keep them green and just keep them where they are, thriving and see what happens. The curious soul inside me thinks I should experiment with at least two of the three..

I then found this:
"You have to shorten the day light it receives. In high school I worked at a green house and we raised 50,000 plus poinsettias a year. Starting around September place it in the closet around 3 pm and take it out around 7am. This will force the leaves to turn red. Its a lot of work, trust me I know after all the years i worked in the green house I have never bought a poinsettia since."

What would you do bloggers?