DIY Blog

Turn that Valentine’s Day candy box into a heart-shaped frame.

Or better yet, make your own valentine’s day chocolates and don’t buy that heart-shaped box in the first place.

Recycled Valentine’s Candy Box Picture Frame [link][via]

These marble picture fridge magnets thingys make great stocking suffers. Useful too, to stick on the fridge or on any metal surface, such as a file cabinet. They keep papers from flying everywhere or just be used to decorate your cube. The marbles you need for this project are very easy to find. Try home decoration shops (people put them in jars to decorate) or gaming stores (they are used as tokens in many board games). As for the magnets, you can use any small magnet, really, but the best would be to use rare earth neodymium magnets (not rare heart as Ive seen in a store). You can easily order them online if you don’t have any.

DIY Marble Magnets [link]

This is yet another gift wrapping post. This one focuses on reusing old newspapers (or this morning’s newspaper) to wrap gifts.

Wrapping gifts with newspapers is a great idea considering that most wrapping papers are produced overseas, with little or no recycled content, and are used to re-package something that’s already packaged! The general idea is to wrap the gifts as nicely as you can. If you wrap them sloppily, they won’t look good. If done properly, you can make a statement and feel even better about giving.

Remember the 3Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Something that isn’t consumed never needs to get Recycled at all. Whatever you do, recycle all wrapping papers. Keep and reuse gift bags and nice wrapper decorations, such as ribbons. It’s as easy as putting them away for next year instead of tossing them. You’ll also save a trip to the store come next holiday season.

Green Gift Wrapping [link]

Happy Festivus! If you have nothing planned tonight, perhaps you should embrace the Festivus for the Rest of Us.

[???]A Festivus for the Rest of Us: How to Celebrate the Seinfeld Holiday [link]

If you’re to lazy to make it yourself, you can buy a festivus pole here.

Yay. I’m done with the crazyness. I’ve finished my Christmas shopping tonight. No more long lineups at the cash register, no more fighting in the parking lots, no more fracking Christmas music.

All that’s left is to wrap those gifts. How about you? Done with the Christmas gifts? Maybe you don’t celebrate the Christian holiday. If that’s the case, consider yourself lucky and enjoy the holidays with your friends and family, or take a few days off and relax.

For the rest of us, awaiting the food shoveling and aunt kissing and handshaking and driving too fast in the snow because we’re late for the party, here’s a nice collection of gift wrapping tips. It would be much better if it were more illustrated, but hey, you can figure it out!

Good luck and happy wrapping

Homemade Holiday Cards and Gift Wrapping [link]

Christmas is a capitalistic orgy of overconsumption. You know it’s true. If we’re not ready to cut down on the Christmas junk we give each other, maybe we can cut down on the junk used to wrap the gifts. This project is an interesting take on this concept: turning cracker boxes, or cereal boxes into cool boxes to wrap your gifts.

It’ll be that much junk in the landfills down the road. If you do wrap your gifts with the boring paper they sell everywhere, please make sure it’s recycled once the gifts are unwrapped.

How to Wrap Christmas Gifts Using Trash [link] [via]

Wanting to take full control of his Christmas tree, Brian from Hackszine used the open-source Arduino microcontroller to drive a homemade grid array of 64 LEDs. Pretty nice. Again, a nice project that can be decontextualized, rehashed and reinterpreted in the true hacker/xmas spirit.

Arduino-Powered Holiday Lights [link] [via]

Just in time for the holidays, Poopscape shares a tutorial from a vintage craft book which details how to make these clip-on mushroom ornaments.

I bet with a little imagination, this can appeal to the old-school Nintendo gamer as well.

Sequined Mushroom Ornaments [link] [via]

The holidays are upon us, and chances are we’ll end up needing candles. Scented Candles are ridiculously expensive and you can save a bundle by making your own. All you need is paraffin, or bee’s wax, wick, and optionally, a few drops of essential oils.

Don’t burn the house down!Scented Candles [link]