You don’t always need to buy tools

The saying is that necessity is the mother of all invention. And it is the absolute truth.  If you need to do something but you don’t have the tools to hand, you will be forced to improvise, especially if that necessity is really, really necessary.

I don’t know if I ever told you this but many moons ago I had a watch that I so wanted to wear.  It wasn’t an expensive watch but beautiful nonetheless. It looked like it was made of solid gold. Of course it wasn’t, nor was it gold plated, but that didn’t stop me wanting to wear it because it was that pretty. The only problem is that the bracelet was too big for my wrist. Having examined the links in the bracelet I could see that, if I used some ‘engineering’ techniques I might be able to remove the right number of links in order for it to fit my wrist.  I could see that each link was attached to the next by a miniature screw and we had no screwdriver in the house that would be small enough to fit in the groove of the head.  So, what to do?  OK, what I did have were plenty of small paperclips around my desk. What I did was open one up and then spent hours filing the end flat enough to fit the grooves of the tiny screws in the links. And what do you know? I had fashioned a miniature screwdriver which worked like a charm. Of course, paperclips can also be used as temporary keyrings too and I’ve even turned one into an S-shape so that it can be used as a type of hook.  

There are many other things you can use that don’t require you to spend vast, or even small, sums of money.  As an amateur artist, I spend as little as I possibly can on art supplies, unless I have vouchers or loyalty points I’ve accumulated. If you were to go through my art supplies you might be surprised to learn that, with the exception of 2 or 3 items, most were either going away gifts, gifts in general or bought using loyalty points. I’ve even managed to scrounge throwaway items from retailers. As an amateur artist, who’d love to be, one of the most frustrating aspects of using pencils to draw is the rubbing out part.  A lot of the time, a decent drawing is ruined by the smudges. Smudges, if you don’t know, can never be got rid of, even if you then switch to a new or better eraser. Of course, retailers of expensive art materials tout the virtues of their kneadable erasers. They might work but they are also very expensive for the small size of eraser they sell. Well I refuse to buy those kneadable erasers, mostly because I found that the ones that came free with the gifts I received were not as good as the makers claim them to be. But I did find an alternative at the fraction of the cost. And when I say fraction, I mean the smallest fraction you can think of, and on top of that it works better than any eraser you can think of, without leaving any residue. Blue tac is your answer, my art friends, and it’s available everywhere.

Now, dentists say that dental floss is your best friend. Some years ago, one dentist on a local radio station claimed that, even if you don’t get the chance to brush your teeth, the least you can do is floss and rinse. But I discovered that floss has another use to it.  It’s almost like very thin nylon string and is as equally strong.  Try to pull it apart as hard as you can using whatever force you can muster up and I guarantee it will not break. The only thing that will break it in half is a pair of scissors or some sharp object. Well when I discovered this I realised I could fix a folding garden chair part of which seems had begun to come apart. I found a needle whose eye was large enough to thread the floss.  A double knot and several tight tacking back and forth, back and forth and it is still intact despite the fact that I sit on that chair every single day for ages. A heavy duty stapler did not work but something as common and simple and readily available as dental floss did. Go figure.

And finally, this one is my mum’s idea. Not everyone has a funnel in their kitchen and sometimes you need to pour liquid from a blender jug into a smaller jam jar so my mum decided to take a mineral water bottle and cut off a quarter of the bottle nearest the top. Turn it over and lo and behold we have a funnel. Quite ingenious of my mum, if you ask me.