“Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Igor, would you give me a hand with the bags? Igor: [doing a Groucho Marx] Certainly, you take the blonde and I'll take the one in the turban.” - Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks

Ok, that’s a sexist joke. But it’s no joke that my wife, Sara, ends up handling the plastic bags in the kitchen. Those ubiquitous zipper closures, bread bags and other storage bags that get gooey and crumby but are still perfectly useable. The lucky few have a recycling infrastructure that takes them. For the rest of us, it’s wash out, shake, and hang to dry. But where? You can’t drape them over a clothesline. They must hang upside down and opened up to drain and…..breathe.

We saw fancy racks made just for this purpose in catalogs, but at 20 bucks plus shipping, we thought we could find a cheaper solution. Then Sara came up with a brilliant, yet simple idea.

Chopsticks!

In addition to a surfeit of plastic bags, we also have a lot of leftover chopsticks from Asian restaurants. We use some for marking the beans in the garden, some for the occasional school project for the twins, and toss the rest on the kindling pile next to the woodstove. Sara noticed the commercial bag dryers used narrow sticks protruding up from a block of wood. So she set off, chopsticks in hand, to find something to stick them into. She was going to make her own bag dryer from objects around the house.

Out in the garage she found what she was looking for, a distributor cap from an old VW Beetle. I don’t know why we still had that thing laying around out there or where it came from (I drove my last Beetle in 1975), but there it was. Do they even make distributor caps anymore, with fuel injection? Anyway, now we had our supplies for making a funky, zero cost bag dryer.

Here’s the complex do it yourself pictorial:

Lay the chopsticks and distributor cap on the table. One chopstick for each socket on the cap.

Stick the wide end of the chopstick into the sockets on the caps, starting with the center hole first. No glue needed, they should friction fit.

Stand it up above the sink in the window - and voila! - dry your bags! This VW one will dry 5 bags at a time; if you can find a V-8 cap you can dry up to 9! If you have more than 9 a day to dry, try using fewer bags!

There you have it; you just saved 20 bucks and found a new life for some chopsticks and an old auto part. What else have you got laying around the house you can put to new use? See more chopstick stories here!

Write your comments and ideas below!