Essential life skill: toilet paper origami

Essential life skill #2: folding toilet paper into pleasing shapes. This might be even more essential than making paper straw wrappers into flowers—just imagine all the joy you could spread during your countless opportunities to do this. Leave a surprise in the bathroom of your dinner party host. (No! I mean a nice surprise.) Or delight the next visitor who enters that public restroom stall. In just 60 seconds, you can make someone else's life worth living.

To learn some easy toilet paper folding techniques, go here. I tried this one, above. And when you've mastered these, you can get this book. Note: my thick Cottonelle worked okay for this design, but cheap, crisp public restroom tissue would be ideal. Now go forth and beautify bathrooms everywhere.

Essential life skill: money origami

Essential life skill #3: folding a shirt and tie from a dollar bill. In terms of usefulness, I rank this right up there with the ability to parallel park. This is my first-ever money origami attempt, which was much more successful than the parallel parking section of my driving test, which I failed. Granted, nobody needs to parallel park in rural Minnesota where I grew up, so the incentive to learn was not great. A more useful skill is avoiding animals in your path, such as my math teacher's escaped pig which was loitering in the middle of the road one morning during my lesson. Mr. math teacher came to the door in his boxers when we knocked to tell him his hog had gotten out. But I digress.

You can fold yourself a drawerful of shirts by following an instructional video. I used this one and then referred to this one when I got stuck.

Essential life skill: making roses from straw wrappers

Look what came on top of the straw in my drink from a local Thai restaurant. Completely charming. So my new mission in life is to get good at making roses from paper straw wrappers. It seems like an essential skill to have, just like tying your shoes or balancing your checkbook. So far I have only practiced on one straw and my rose came out looking like a ball of waste paper, but I'm determined to master this new party trick. I think the process should go something like this video here, minus the thread.