The Secret Yumiverse Features
How To: Three More Ways To Open A Wine Without A Corkscrew
Don't let a missing corkscrew deter you from uncorking your bottle of wine at your next party, picnic or romantic dinner at home. Following up on a previous post on how to open a bottle of wine using just a towel and a flat, vertical surface (a wall or a wide tree trunk), listed below are three more handy ways you can open a bottle of wine using common household objects or tools. And what better way to impress your date than taking off your shoe, placing a wine bottle between your knees, and ...
How To: 13 Cool Ways to Use Rubber Bands
Other than holding together bundles of pens or creating a miniature catapult for a science project, rubber bands have many other surprisingly practical uses in the kitchen, office, for DIY home projects and more.
How To: 9 Super-Practical Uses for the Humble Safety Pin
Originally invented by American mechanic Walter Hunt in 1849, the humble safety pin was first called a "dress pin." It was intended to solve the problem of bent pins and wounded fingers, but that's not all it's good for.
How To: Make a DIY Light Bulb Aquarium
Add new life to your old light bulbs by transforming them into a DIY light bulb aquarium. Using needle-nose pliers, a screwdriver, and a small hammer, you can remove the copper connector and other inner components from the light bulb to create a clear opening from the stem to within the bulb.
How To: Make Your Own Sweetened Condensed Milk at Home
To make your own sweetened condensed milk at home, all you need are milk, sugar, butter, and about two hours of your time.
How To: 9 Non-Condiment Uses for Mustard
Plain yellow mustard, most commonly used for adding an extra zing of flavor to your ballpark hot dog, also contains potent medicinal properties that is perfect for relieving your sore throat, relaxing your sore back muscles and decreasing the intensity of your headache.
How To: 6 DIY Cat Toys You Can Make Out of Household Items
Need to keep your favorite feline entertained at home? Using common household items lying around your bathroom or kitchen, you can craft together DIY cat toys that cost nothing to make and will provide endless entertainment for your favorite cat.
How To: 9 Ways to Get People to Do What You Want
The art of persuasion (or subtle emotional manipulation, depending on how you're looking at it) does not necessarily have to be an evil thing.
How To: 7 Easy Ways to Remove Water Ring Marks from Wood Furniture
Summertime is officially here, which means that the likelihood of someone leaving a glass of cold water on your wooden furniture without a coaster and leaving behind an annoying water ring mark on the surface has increased tenfold. What can you do to get rid of that annoying mark?
How To: 11 Crazy Useful Things You Can Do with a Candle
Originally made using whale fat, candles first appeared over 2,200 years ago as a means of illumination. From the 1st century up until the 19th century, candles were primarily made using beeswax or tallow, and aside from providing light, were used as a method of keeping time.
How To: 6 DIY Ideas for Keeping Your Earbuds Tangle-Free
If you always carry earbuds with you in your purse or backpack, you can use simple household objects to prevent the cords from tangling up into knots.
How To: The Best Way to Peel a Hard-Boiled Egg
So, you want to decrease your hard-boiled egg peeling time because you don't want the time- consuming task to cut into your limited lunch break. Or maybe you've somehow been burdened with the task of cooking a lot of homemade deviled eggs for a big family gathering. How do you peel a hard-boiled egg as quickly and efficiently as possible?
How To: 8 Awesome Uses for Chalk That You've Probably Never Heard Of
Commonly associated with classroom blackboards and sidewalk art, chalk can also be used to repel ants from invading your home, lift grease stains from clothes, prevent your tools from rusting, and hide your wall scrapes and nicks in a pinch.
How To: Make Your Own DIY Lipstick Out of Crayola Crayons
You probably shouldn't ever eat Crayola crayons, but you can definitely chop them up into tiny pieces, melt them over boiling water with coconut oil and olive oil, pour into an empty contact lens case and use the final congealed product as lipstick for your lips. Yes, it really is that simple.
How To: 13 Unexpected to Downright Crazy Uses for Mason Jars
Invented by Philadelphia tinsmith John L. Manson in 1858 for canning and preserving perishables, mason jars are experiencing a major resurgence in the DIY community. In addition to being a handy storage device for both food and non-food items, its old-timey, quaintly antiquated look also makes for good drinking glasses, candle holders, flower vases and eye-pleasing decorations.
How To: 12 Awesome Kitchen Hacks for Your Next Cooking Adventure
Good home-cooking does require time, but not every step of the process has to be a time-consuming chore.
How To: 17 Foods That Suppress Your Appetite
Smell some mint leaves or drink peppermint tea the next time you feel the urge to snack on unhealthy junk food or overindulge during a meal. Studies have shown that the scent and flavor of mint and peppermint leaves are known for suppressing your appetite and making you feel less hungry.
How To: 7 Home Remedies for Growing Healthy, Strong Nails
How important is it to have healthy and strong nails? Strong nails are better for manicures and are also more pleasing to present in public. Regular nail growth is also an overall indicator of good health, while discolorations and indentations on your nail beds, or even just slow nail growth, can be a sign of underlying health problems.
How To: 14 Handy Hacks for Making Your Produce & Perishables Last as Long as Possible
Each year, about 40% of all food produced in the United States goes uneaten and gets thrown away. Become a part of the solution and not the problem by practicing the following simple hacks to make your produce and perishables from the supermarket last for as long as possible.
How To: Organize Your Chaotic Cable Clutter
If you are like most people, you probably have a discordant mess of cable and computer cords in your workspace or living room snaking all over the floor or against your desk. Though you can buy various cable organizers at the computer store, you can also organize them the DIY way with bread twist ties, binder clips, cardboard tubes, old credit cards, Velcro tape, or even your old hair clip.
How To: Yumi's Guide to Easter Egg Blowing
Get crafty this Easter weekend with egg blowing, a technique where you poke holes on the ends of raw eggs and blow out all the yolk so that you can use the empty, still-intact eggshells for painting and decorating. Fun for the whole family and all that huffing and puffing just may distract you long enough from over-binging on the giant chocolate bunny and that package of sugary Peeps. Happy Easter!
How To: Fall Back Asleep After Waking Up in the Middle of the Night
If you wake up in the middle of the night, avoid reaching for your laptop to check emails, or your TV remote to catch a few late-night shows. Instead, keep the light in your bedroom dim and do something relaxing like de-stressing breathing exercises, meditation, light yoga, or going to another room and solving a jigsaw puzzle or listening to relaxing music.
How To: 11 Surprising Things You Should Never Throw into the Recycle Bin
While it is common sense to toss empty water bottles into the recycle bin, most people do not know that it is also important to remove the plastic bottle cap before recycling. Plastic bottle caps and plastic bottles are made up of different plastics, and the plastic found in bottle caps are not as useful for recycling centers as the plastic found in bottles.
How To: 9 Surprisingly Toxic Foods
Tin cans have resin linings that contain bisphenol-A (BPA), which has been linked in animal lab testings to a number of ailments that include reproductive problems, heart disease, and obesity. Tomatoes are high in acidity, which means that the content of canned tomatoes eats away at the resin lining, which causes BPA to leach into what you eat. Long story short: avoid canned tomatoes at all costs.
How To: 7 Home Remedies for Removing & Preventing Blackheads
While blackheads are a little different from your run-of-the-mill acne and zits, they are still annoying when they appear on your face and, thankfully, can be banished with a number of DIY home remedies incorporating common household products.
How To: 18 Ways to Add More Iron to Your Diet
Iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency in the United States, and how much or how little you properly consume iron on a daily basis can be the difference between feeling constantly tired or feeling like you are energized enough to seize the day.
How To: Make Flavor-Infused Vodka
It may sound complicated, but making your own flavor-infused vodka is effortlessly easy with delicious results, and it makes for a great last-minute holiday gift. All you need are some fresh fruit and herbs, a quart-sized mason jar, a bottle of vodka (make sure it isn't the super-cheap kind), and a few days of waiting time.
How To: Make Your Own Non-Toxic Dryer Sheets
While they may make your clothes smell fresh after a cycle in the dryer, commercial dryer sheets contain many harmful and toxic chemicals that have been linked to causing cancer.
How To: 10 Ways to Use Exam Gloves in the Kitchen
While medical exam gloves are commonly associated with hospitals and not the kitchen, they actually are unexpectedly useful for a number of cooking and cleaning uses that require handling extremely messy things.
How To: Prevent, Detect, & Eliminate Potential Mold Growth in Your Home
While mold is a naturally occurring phenomenon outdoors and in nature, it can be a major health hazard and an expensive problem if it infiltrates the inside of your home.
How To: 7 Halloween Makeup Tricks Using Common Household Items
Need to look like a rotting, decaying zombie corpse for Halloween? Rather than bribing your special effects makeup artist friend to treat you one for the night, you can definitely DIY a couple of good Halloween makeup effects using common household items in your pantry or medicine cabinet.
Survival 101: 6 Ways to Purify Water in the Wild
Whether you are camping for the first time or you find yourself stranded somewhere due to a natural disaster or zombie apocalypse, it is important to know how to purify water in the wild if you don't have immediate access to store-bought water bottles.
How To: Make a Cheap, DIY Fog Machine for Your Halloween Party
Need to add some spooky ambient fog to your super-scary Halloween party? Rather than shelling out money for a fog machine you'll probably only use once a year, make a trip to the nearest drug store and pick up a bottle of glycerin, a gallon of distilled water, a 2-liter bottle of cola, a disposable mini-pie tin, and a big candle in a jar.
How To: Preserve Maple Leaves
'Tis the season to get crafty with maple leaves. Rather than buying fake maple leaves from the craft store, save real-life maple leaves you find on the ground outdoors using one of the following preservation techniques below.
How To: Unshrink Jeans & Other Clothes That Shrunk in the Dryer
Is your cotton tank top or beloved pair of jeans feeling a bit tighter than usual? If you need to un-shrink an article of clothing that has been left in the dryer for too long, then you can use baby shampoo, hair conditioner, or simply water to gently stretch and pull the fabric back into its original shape.
How To: 10 Truly Last-Minute Halloween Costume Ideas for the Cheap & Lazy
Unlike your more artistically-minded friends who've been working on their homemade, hand-stitched, conceptually-brilliant Halloween costumes since May, you need to put together a last-minute costume in a matter of hours. What can you possibly do if you're cheap, kind of lazy, and don't know how to sew to save your life?
Recipe for Horror: How to Make Fake Blood Capsules for Halloween
Want to go the extra mile with your scary costume this Halloween? Use fake blood capsules. At an opportune moment, fake blood can slowly dribble out of your vampiric mouth like you've just finished sucking blood out of an innocent bystander's neck. Or, if you're a zombie, it'll look like you've just finished feasting on the flesh of some poor non-zombie sap.
How To: Create Giant, Reusable Bubbles Out of Elmer's Glue & Liquid Starch
Creating giant, reusable bubbles at home is easy, and it's a fun project for children. Just dump a whole bottle of non-toxic Elmer's Clear School Glue into a bowl, add fine glitter and watercolors (or food coloring), and slowly mix together Sta-Flo Liquid Starch to form a pliable concoction.
How To: Remove Wrinkles from Clothing Without Ironing
Need to remove wrinkles from your shirt but don't want to bust out the iron and ironing board (or don't even have one)? Well, with a little bit of do-it-yourself ingenuity, you can "iron out" that wrinkly top in no time.
How To: 9 Poppin' Uses for Bubble Wrap
If you're like me, you have a secret dream of living in a house completely covered wall-to-wall and carpet-to-carpet in bubble wrap. Until you have enough of that pliable transparent plastic with air-filled bubbles, there are some truly practical things you can do with the little you do have—besides packing fragile objects.