I've just stumbled across this lovely paper from Sun et al., which reports a delightfully cheap and simple technique for extracting DNA from agarose gel slices.
Basically it's straightforward as poking a hole in the bottom of a .5 ml microcentrifuge tube, then nesting that inside a 1.5 ml tube. Some cotton or glass wool then goes in the bottom of the .5 ml tube, with your agarose slice containing your excised DNA band on top, and you just spin it through; apparently the agarose gets retained on the wool and the aqueous phase gets spun to the lower compartment.
DNA gel extraction kits aren't the most expensive thing you're likely to buy (at about £1.50/$2 per tube), but if you do them occasionally it might be worth trying it out for the time saving: if you are doing lots regularly, it might well save a pretty penny.
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