The Ikea Pruta 17 piece storage container set  is on sale for £2.89 which is a truly fabulous deal for so much storage. The containers are transparent with a green tint to the lids and can be stacked for easy storage.

• Click here to check out the containers from Ikea

You can stack the Pruta containers inside one another to save space in your kitchen if you are struggling with limited shelving, and they also stack neatly on top of one another if you prefer a more organised look to your kitchen.

The kit comes with plenty of different storage sizes, from small lunchbox organisers to larger boxes for roasts or salads. The different sizes and shapes make it a complete winner as often you need something a bit deeper for your fridge or shelves.

I adore this type of thing and often can’t resist nabbing yet another set in a sale somewhere. A lovely buy for those of you who live near an Ikea. If you don’t, phone a friend and get them to pick one up for you.

Thanks to ederj at HUKD!

It struck me a week ago, when I was at a small fair browsing through some lovely stationary. On display were several beautiful organiser boxes. You can use these to store birthday cards for example, or recipes. There was also a generic, blank one that you could adapt to your own needs. You can see what I mean here.

And suddenly I thought, why don't I have some sort of planner or organiser for bargains? It has been more than a year since I first started writing for PlayPennies, and during that time I've come to realise that so many sales, bargains, and voucher codes are cyclical.

But, how easy it is to remember dates? Or which companies are likely to have voucher codes out there? And that's when it occured to me that, just like you do with your budget plan, you could also have a bargain plan.

It is a shame though that we're not a bit more like America over here in the UK. In the US there are some key dates every year when they have massive sales. There's something they call Black Friday - and I've no idea why or what it means. But apparently the sales are unbelievable and it happens every year just after Thanksgiving.

The photo above comes from a blog with an extensive write up of this sale. But, the main reason I used this photo is because of the chap pushing two little boys just on the side. Look closely. The boys are in what appears to be a sort of buggy or shop trolley in the shape of a double decker lorry or bus!

Catalogues

First, the most obvious. Catalogues. Which companies are you most likely to order from? For me that would be Argos. They tend to renew their catalogue twice a year, and when they do there's a whole lot of stuff that goes on sale or into the clearance. January and June are the two main ones. Which means that this month, May, is a good time to take a look at their sale items, and also check out their clearance outlet on eBay.

Store Sales

We all know about the famous New Years Harrods sale. But what about the other department stores? Make a note in your calendar, or ask while you're in the store. Debenhams Blue Cross sale, where you can get up to 70% off, started at the beginning of April this year for example.

Holiday companies are also big on having annual sales, although these days you can generally find a bargain all year round using sites like Lastminute.com. Thomson's has its own Blue Cross sale in and around February/March each year, for example.

Ikea does a quite good summer sale. This is usually around July. I have friends who had their eye on a dining table at Ikea, however at £400 it was out of their price range. By keeping a close eye on the sale, and having nerves of steel, they managed to pick it up for £50 right at the end of the sale.

These days it does seem like the whole year is just one long sale. However, don't be fooled. The really amazing bargains are still waiting, ready for you to pounce on them in the winter sales. If you want to get them though you do have to do a little preparation.

You know you can ask the store when their sale will be starting. Make a date in your diary. If you get a nice sales assistant, or you're well known in the store, you may be able to get all sorts of information out of them. Like whether or not a dress you're going to buy will be in the sale.

Voucher Codes

Keep a note of the stores that regularly have voucher codes available. For example, just as one 20% discount at the Early Learning Centre is ending, another one will pop up. So, if you're buying something from there, and there isn't a code, it might pay to wait a week or two.

Dorothy Perkins also regularly has a 25% off code that's worth waiting for. Next is a little more variable with its discounts, but at least once a quarter (that's every three months) it will have a Free Delivery code available. If you keep a note of that on your calendar, you'll know whether it is worth waiting a bit longer (oooh look, it was nearly three months since the last one) or not (oh no, the most recent Next free delivery code expired just last week).

Eating Out or In

Even if you don't have school age children, keep a note of the general times for school holidays in your calendar. Big eatery chains and pizza restaurants will time deals and special offers for these dates.

It is rare, for example, that there's not a Pizza Hut and/or Dominos voucher code that will get you a free pizza, or 50% off your order, around the school holidays. Especially in the summer.

We generally have these on our site here at PlayPennies, so always make sure you look. Also, even if a chain doesn't have a restaurant near where you live, it could come in handy when you go on holiday.

So Tell Me ...

What have I missed? I've tried over the last week to put together all the different regular bargain times and places, and make a note of anything I've noticed like regular voucher codes. I hope that these are of some use to you all. But is there anything that you've noticed yourself, and I've not got here? If so then do share! Thank you.

Ikea are selling antique pine 'Alve' Solid Wooden Office Desks for £50.33 instead of £233.66, that's a WHOPPING £173.33 saving.

The price listed for the Alve solid wooden office desks is £55.33 but comes down to £50.33 if you have an Ikea Family Card - if you don't have one, you can sign up for one instore and use it straight away to get the discount.

• Click HERE to go over to Ikea

It can get to the stage where the kitchen table just doesn't cut it as a suitable office desk anymore and you need something 'proper' - like the Alve wooden office desks that Ikea are selling in antique pine.

I was going to say it would be great for teenagers, in their rooms, so they could study and do their homework at it but then I remembered!  Teenagers don't DO homework or study...or at least mine don't appear to and they both have wooden office desks, those desks are more of a token nod to the idea of learning.

These Alve solid wooden office desks have a cord outlet at the back which collects cords and cables in one place; have a drawer for your keyboard and mouse, saving you space on the actual desk top and will accomodate a 19" monitor.

Now the blurb doesn't say whether that's a 19" CRT monitor or not, but can you actually BUY CRT monitors anymore?! I've been in the flatscreen world for so long I'm not sure.

The bottom drawer is big enough to hold files and these wooden office desks are easy to keep clean - just wipe over with a damp cloth and dry with a dry one; simple.

The dimensions of these Alve wooden office desks are width: 152 cm, depth: 65 cm and height: 74 cm.

Thanks to KingCampo at HUKD

Last week, fellow PlayPennies writer Tamsin wrote a feature post on Make Your Own Christmas Wrapping Paper. To be honest, I thought that sounded a bit easy. Get some paper and have your child crayon a bit. What I didn't realise was that in actual fact it would be the best crafty fun we'd have together pre-Christmas AND the end result looked fabulous!

I have a roll of paper - it's fairly low quality I guess, kind of like wallpaper liner but thinner and smaller. It cost very little from Ikea, and has the massive advantage of being able to pull as much off as you want. I couldn't find it online, on the Ikea website, but I did find these rolls of drawing paper on Amazon.

My son (5 and a half) asked for his crayons and glitter. I also had some ribbon (I keep all the odd bits and pieces of ribbon you get throughout the year in a container).

The first lot of wrapping paper was particularly special. This was for his class teacher, who he has a wee crush on, and he put a lot of thought into every picture he drew on there, and the exact mix of glitter colours used! It might look like just random blobs to the untrained eye, but trust me, there was a lot of method in that madness.

He'd run out of creative steam on the next piece of wrapping paper, this was for his teaching assistant (who is lovely). He just wanted to draw stars and Christmas trees.  This is when I had a brainwave. I am useless at drawing stars (as you can see from above), and besides I wanted it all to be his work as much as possible. Minimal input from mummy!

So I had the idea of using a cookie cutter. This came from the Salter Kids In The Kitchen baking set we were lucky enough to review back in the summer. I don't think that a week goes by where we don't get this set out although this is the first time we weren't able to eat the end result!

I got the star shaped cookie cutter, and he was able to hold it on the paper, fill it in with PVA glue, and then when the glitter was shaken off he had a near perfect star.

He loved using the glitter. I keep old plastic containers from when we have Chinese takeaways, and he used one as a sort of palette for mixing up some of the colours. But also, he poured the glitter right from the containers - I took the shaker part off the top. This was of course risky! But he wanted to have the stars half one colour, and half another colour, and that wasn't possible using the shaker. I bought the glitter shakers from The Early Learning Centre over a year ago now - they are lasting well! Several birthdays and two Christmases and I still have about a third left in the pots.

This was a massive hit! He loved that he was creating something that looked so good, and very carefully planned out six stars across the paper. Although after he was a bit critical and thought he'd perhaps done too many stars! Interspersed between the stars are crayoned Christmas trees.

What we used for this project:

• Roll of drawing paper
• Crayons
• Glitter
• PVA Glue
• Scissors
• Ribbon

If you wish, you can spend £500 on a cot for your baby. Probably more, if you're Wayne Rooney.

• Or, you can bag one of these bargains at Ikea for £39 instead

Perhaps one of the most overwhelming things about expecting a baby is knowing where to start in terms of all the kit you need. You can spend a fortune without really knowing what's worth splurging on and what you can afford to live without. That's why I LOVE this cot. £39! I don't know of a cheaper one on the market. Heck, even the mattress costs more than that and in lots of baby shops you'd be hard pushed to find a blanket this cheap.

Now, granted, your baby's first cot might not be something  you want to be frugal about. I know my firstborn's grandparents were desperate to pay for something substantial like their first grandchild's cot, and we all harboured a vague idea that it might become a family heirloom; something to pass down to future generations.
The truth is it's stashed in our spare room and my kids play rockets in it every chance they can get.  At this rate I don't know if it'll survive their generation, never mind the future.

But that's why I like this so much. It's cheap as chips and yet it does the job. I can vouch for that because our kids' Scottish granny got one for her spare room and almost 5 years after she bought it it's still going strong, and that's after 4 grandchildren have done significant stints of sleeping in it at various stages over those 5 years. It might not have the wow factor that some of the more expensive models have, and it probably won't win any style awards, although I actually happen to really like its pared-down, simple look. But it's much more sturdy and durable than I expected for this price.

In hindsight I'd have been totally happy to have this cot at home, and to have had a few extra quid to spend on extra-strength coffee to get me through those early days with a newborn. If you're looking for a reliable but basic cot, either to keep down the costs of having a baby, or as a spare at Granny's house, you could do worse than this.

The bed base can be placed at two different heights and its assembled size is as follows: length: 124 cm, width: 66 cm, height: 80 cm, bed width: 60 cm, bed length: 120 cm.

This cot rocks. Er, no pun intended. It doesn't ACTUALLY rock but you know what I mean.