:: Bento tools: Bento-making tools can be expensive (especially those that are made in Japan). However, you can find all the basic tools for decorating your kid's lunch-box in Daiso, from a huge range of food picks (all those pictured above are from Daiso), to silicon cups and tiny food cutters. (You can read more about bento tools from this post.)
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| These food cutters are great for cutting stuff like carrots to dress up your kid's food! |
:: Japanese food & cookware: You can get basic ingredients for Japanese cooking from the store, from soba noodles to seaweed and salad dressing (my mum claims only the sesame dressing is nice though). Plus they have all sorts of cookware, from useful pans for making egg sheets, to pretty pots with floral designs on them (I think those floral pots would be lovely in a little girl's play kitchen!).
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| We're still testing out their salad dressings! I recently bought the pan to make egg sheets for the big boy. |
In fact, most of the cookware in the boys' play kitchen are actually real cookware from Daiso (I just buy the smallest size pots and pans!). These are pretty durable, since they are made for real cooking, and are much cheaper than the play versions!
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| We store the boys' play food in various containers, and I find that the wooden boxes from Daiso are pretty nice for this purpose. That little kettle has been quite a favourite with all the kids that play at our home. |
:: Storage boxes: While boxes from Toyogo can be pretty cheap, I think the quality of the plastic boxes that are sold in Daiso is better! These frosted stacking boxes are my current favourite, and are very useful for sorting out learning and and scrapbooking materials (the medium sized ones are very popular and constantly out of stock, and your best bet at getting these would be at the Plaza Singapura branch). I also like those that come with handles, which we use to store our art supplies.
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| These are stackable, and come in various sizes. Perfect for storing our Montessori materials. |
Another fav of mine are their wooden boxes, which I use to store art materials.
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| This wooden box has a permanent place on our dining table. The stickers are also from Daiso, but I can't find this design any longer! |
:: Vacuum storage bags: Some blog readers shared about these bags on our FB page, and I recently bought a whole bunch of them. They turned out to be so useful, since I can store all our winter clothing and baby clothes inside them, while saving us loads of space! Its especially good for winter clothes since they can take up a whole lot of cupboard room.
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| I love the small bags (since they come in a set of 2) for storing baby clothes. |
:: Craft materials: I used to buy lots of lace for scrapbooking and crafting from Daiso, and I love their DIY buttons which you can cover with your own fabric. Now, I find this place a great place to get other craft materials such as canvases, paint brushes and paper punches for the boys to use. And its one of my top suppliers for stickers for the boys!
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| The stickers are of pretty good quality, and the designs are cute without looking tacky. Those on the left come in a booklet of 8 sheets of different designs, and the boys really love them! |
What are your favourite buys from Daiso?
Justina! The salad dressing is my favourite! :p
ReplyDeleteThe stackable box can crack. One of mine crack n broke. The handle part. :( I love to browse the sewing craft section.
ReplyDeleteLove Daiso! It's like IKEA, I always walk out with something!
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with your top 5! I love the boxes and craft materials the most too! =)
ReplyDeleteI love the bento stuff at Daiso too! Wish they brought new designs in faster though ;p
ReplyDeleteAi @ Sakura Haruka
I also bought cookware for my kids to do kitchen pretend play!
ReplyDeleteWe inherited a whole bunch of these bento things! Fun additions to snack boxes. Love your ideas on using the wooden crates and the real kitchenware. I will look out for them the next time I am at Daiso!
ReplyDeleteMy top fave are the transparent shoe boxes. Bought loads to store all kinds of stuff at home and for homeschooling. I recently added in cuttable plastic dividers (also from Daiso) into the shoe boxes to store & sort our new Lego pieces.
ReplyDeleteAlso bought many of the wooden grain trays for our Montessori shelves.
Always hard to exit from it empty-handed! :p
The cookware for the kids is too clever!
ReplyDeleteWell, over the years, DAISO has gradually been cutting back on the really good value-for-money merchandise among its inventory, perhaps because of cost-cutting measures due to rising costs across the board. I will give you a very good example: many many years ago, perhaps almost 10 years ago, DAISO used to sell a 10-gallon emergency picnic collapsible water container(with built-in tap) for only $2. For those of you who know exactly what this is, you will know that this is a very ridiculously cheap price. No where else on planet Earth can you find this item(especially for a 10-gallon size!) at this price. A few years later, when they realised that they were selling it too cheap(normal retail price from camping stores outside is way more than $10!), they discontinued this item for good. It never came back to DAISO again. You can never find this item in DAISO now. Recently, DAISO revived the emergency picnic collapsible water container(with built-in tap) again and added it back into their inventory again, but guess what? They drastically REDUCED its size to a mere 3-liter size now! From a 10-gallon size to a 3-liter size is a very drastic size reduction, in case you have no idea. Another example: DAISO used to sell bicycle pedals, you know, the part of the bicycle where you step on to pedal your bicycle. As you can guess, a pair of bicycle pedals is expensive even if you buy them from your neighbourhood bicycle shop. But at DAISO, it was for a ridiculous price of only $2! Again, the same thing happened - after a few years when DAISO realised that they were selling the bicycle pedals too cheaply, they put a stop to it to cut losses, and nowadays, DAISO does not sell bicycle pedals anymore because it is a loss-making item. So, my point is, if you see anything in DAISO that you know for sure is selling at a ridiculously super-low loss-making price at $2, please buy more of them and stock up like your life depends on it, because, the fact is, DAISO is now cutting down on costs globally, and the items that are really super-value-for-money are becoming fewer and far between. In my opinion, the best years when you could really get very good value-for-money items, was about more than five to seven years ago, when DAISO was still relatively new in Singapore. After that, they started to cut costs across the board, and started dropping items from their inventory that they considered to be loss-making. That's why many of the items that you have always wanted to buy again, never came back.
ReplyDeleteI just love Japanese stuff. I've been eyeing to get stuff in Daiso. Glad they sell cooking pans too!
ReplyDeleteJapan products = High Quality