light up with a homemade sun jar

erika tipped me on this fabulous hack. i'm liking it a lot - this homemade solar-powered cookie jar by cre8tor, as featured in instructables. it's so whimsical and reminds me of my firefly catching days.

making it seems simple enough. take an ikea glass jar (one from the ikea slom series would do great) and place the parts of a solar garden light into the jar. use blu-tack to adjust and keep the parts in place.

to frost the jar, use a strip of tracing paper or a glass frosting spray. close the lid and you're done. keep the jar by the window with strong sunlight and the light sensing diode at the top of the jar will charge the batteries. when the light goes down, your sun jar lights up. makes a great gift too. link.

salvaging an ikea lack coffee table

well, we know that ikea furniture is not made to last forever but before you trash it, get a little crafty and you may just give it a new lease of life.

chris salvaged his ikea lack coffee table - gave it new legs and a new look. first, he dismantled the table and his wife did a pretty decoupage for the top. then he cut pipe legs and mounted them to the bottom of the table to form the pipe base.

the end result is a totally new table, which looks anything but ikea. seems wobble-proof too.

just a thought - how about putting in the original lower shelf (after decoupage too) for additional storage? and perhaps finding a way to paint or wrap the pipes to match the table? the steel feels a tad cold to me.

step by step instructions here.

another way to view pics in craigslist

this probably belongs to a craigslist hack site but i found this amazingly useful. if you've ever used craigslist, you would have wished that you didn't have to click each entry to view the pictures. now, you don't have to thanks to ryan who created listpic.

just enter your keywords and listpic will search craigslist for entries with pictures. 100 thumbnails on one page, whoopee! browsing becomes a breeze.

give it a whirl. click here to see ikea furniture on sale in the new york area. or enter the city of your choice to see a fresh list.

an international analog clock

sylvia tipped me on a new ikea hack group on instructables and her favourite entry, which is also mine - this super cool international clock by fungus amungus. sadly, nothing much of the ikea rusch clock remains in this hack, except the mechanism.

"this is an international analog clock so you can see what time it is in other cities. with a lazy susan bearing, some magnets, and a couple of bolts this baby rotates and then locks in place, thus changing the time along with the city name on top."

click here for step-by-step pictorial instructions on how to make one.

picture them in light

this one's from steve and i must say that i do like them quite a bit. perhaps they are a reminder of my sis' art school days and me helping her pick out slides or cut transparencies on the backlit contraptions. anyhow, it's old school with new style.

steve made them out of "ikea bas display boxes with a modified ikea light fitting and a small energy efficient bulb. the light fitting throws light up the white back to the frame and glossy white photo paper lining the sides, and gets diffused by a piece of animator's paper just behind the transparency."

what i like best is that even during the day, the pictures show through. nice.

riddim's cocktail shaker light

another lamp from the prolific hacker riddim. an ikea coctail shaker + 25W bulb makes one moody lantern.

riddim's other lamp hacks:
> it's grate lightning
> a basketful of light

need help taking ikea furniture apart

"we finished furnishing our one-bed apartment with exclusively ikea furniture and just when i thought everything was perfect, we found out that we have to move out of state! i want to take everything with me, but there is no way to get the ikea bed (malm) out of our bedroom unless we take it apart. is there some place where we can get instructions on dis-assembling IKEA furniture?

we also have the following:
1. lillberg sofa
2. a futon no longer shown on the ikea site
3. magiker sideboard

but the bed is the one i really need to take apart if I hope to vacate my apartment. please help! thanks." - tweety

(tweety also wrote to ikea's customer service and the 'official' reply is that they "are unable to give advice on how to dismantle ikea products as they are not made to be taken apart once assembled.")

tweety,
not sure if i'm much of a help either. i guess i'll just back-track how i put it together. anyone?