Make: Online: Holiday projects Archives

Archive: Holiday projects

February 9, 2010

<3 your maker: MAKE's Valentine's Day gift guide

We're all suckers for romance, even if most of us believe Valentine's Day is a holiday dreamed up by industry fatcats. Here are MAKE's staff picks for ways to celebrate with that special someone, maker style. Read on, it's a big list!

Build a bike

A personalized bike built for your sweetie can be really romantic, since all that hard work and custom choices relate specifically to the one you love. MAKE Advisory Board member Saul Griffith built a bike for his lady, Staff Editor Arwen O'Reilly Griffith. She writes:

When my husband and I were dating, we had a running argument about flowers. I love them, whether it's a rare orchid or a weed from the sidewalk, and it mystified me that he could never remember to surprise me with even a dandelion. But one Valentine's Day, he presented this bicycle to me with a grin from ear to ear. His addiction is bicycles, so I knew this was a true gesture of love. He bought the different components on Craigslist and from various bike stores to make a bike that fit me to a T, stenciled my name on the frame, and hand-build the wheels. The spokes were twisted, just like two beautiful flowers.

What are you doing to celebrate Valentine's Day with your maker love? Share with us in the comments!

January 29, 2010

Electroluminescent papercraft

Rob Ryan makes papercuts. It's an art, and he's good at it, and maybe it's slightly unfair that it took the gimmick of mounting one over a piece of electroluminescent sheet for me to sit up and pay attention. Still, it looks great. Kudos, Ryan! [via Dude Craft]

More:

January 9, 2010

Lego minifig snowperson

I assume that minifigs are gender-neutral in the absence of characteristic clothing or hairpieces. Danes Bjarne Tveskov and family are responsible for Lego Leslie, here. [via The Brothers Brick]

January 6, 2010

World's tiniest "snow" man

If you're like me, you may be disappointed to learn that the world's smallest snowman is, in fact, not made of snow at all. It's tin that's been etched with a focused ion beam (FIB) instrument, with bits of ion-welded platinum for the nose and to hold the tin spheres together. I guess it's impractical to work with actual ice when you're at the 10 micrometer scale. For comparison, a human hair is about 50 micrometers across. It's the work of Dr. David Cox and co-workers at the National Physical Laboratory in London.

Beyond awesome: launching a Christmas tree

Oh my gawd, this is hysterical. These guys launched their Christmas tree on 32 rocket engines. The launch is glorious.

Christmas Tree Rocketry: The Art and Science of Holiday Recycling

January 5, 2010

Desaturated Santa costume

No, they haven't been photoshopped. Brody S. made this awesome black-and-white Santa suit for San Francisco Santa Con 2009. [via Dude Craft]

January 4, 2010

DIY New Year's Eve LED ball

Garrett Mace, aka Macetech, built this LED NYE ball, using his own Macetech LED controller and Arduino shield kits (and a Seeduino). He writes:

I used six Satellite Modules (high power RGB LED arrays), six ShiftBars (three channel LED controllers), a Seeeduino, and a ShiftBrite Shield to build a New Year's ball for our own mini Times Square event. The ball was a "sparkleball" made of about 120 16oz plastic cups hot-glued together. We threw a rope over a branch and lowered it at midnight...it lit up the whole yard!

2010 New Year's ball

December 29, 2009

Tesla tornado xmas tree

Instructables user mrfixits writes:

This Tesla Tornado is made using a Subaru blower fan motor, complete with its 3-position speed switch mounted on the base. The blower motor has a flywheel fabricated out of Lexan with 6 neodymium magnets mounted in it. It magnetically couples with 6 magnets in the Tesla Pump disc pack, which is inside the vortex tube. The Tesla pump discs are magnetically driven by the blower motor flywheel magnets, so there is no direct connection. The pump disc pack is self-centering, and there is no rotating shaft, shaft bearings, or seals required.

Because nothing says xmas like the slurp of that water pump! Great walkthrough of the building of this Tesla Tornado.

Christmas Tree responds to Twitter mentions

Alpay Kasal's Twitter-enabled "Twistmas" ~~twee~~ tree responds to specific keyword mentions by lighting corresponding ornaments -

After designing a Twitter based installation for GE Healthcare, I looked forward to putting some Arduino's and LED's to work on a personal project. While speaking with Psytek, a founder of a hackerspace in Brooklyn called AlphaOneLabs, we decided an interactive Christmas tree would be a lot of fun. He bought a tree. I hunted for clear ornaments to stick the led's into, and after coming up dry, we set out to make our own. I thought this would be the easy part, it wasn't, I underestimated the elusive nature of ornaments in the wild. Eventually I found "golf display cases" at The Container Store.

Read more of the story over at LitStudios and check out a live feed of the tree in action at Alpha One Labs

December 26, 2009

What ya get?

So, what presents did you give? Get? We'd especially love to hear from folks who used our gift guides to buy (or make) presents and how your recipients liked them.

Above image from Tada's Revolution.

December 25, 2009

Draco the red-nosed dragon

Robin and Chuck Nudd are at it again with their festive dragon. Chuck built the beaste out of junk steel a few winters ago, and Robin dresses him in seasonal finery, which is updated just about every month.

December 23, 2009

Free holiday airport wifi

Google's sponsoring free wifi this holiday season at 54 airports in the states, through January 15th. Some airports already had free wifi (Phoenix and Seattle recently for me, keep on doin' it right, guys!), but for those that didn't, this promises to take the sting out of that snowy delay or congested terminal. My RSS reader would sing carols if JFK were on that list!

December 22, 2009

Christmas tree siphon

Like having a real Christmas tree, but hate having to crawl underneath it to keep it watered? Well, Andrew King has a pretty good solution. He set up a small tank of water next to the tree, then ran a hose over to it to make an xmas tree siphon. Nice and easy, and you end up with more space under the tree for presents. I think I would make mine to look like a giant water tower, to match the train that we have running under there.

Snow skull

Rachel @ CRAFT writes:

If you've received any of the snow from the big winter storm of 2009 this last week, why not try something a little different than the everyday snowman? Paul Overton of Dude Craft and Noah Scalin of Skull A Day may have had their collaboration plans thwarted by the weather, but their resulting alternative project was fantastic.

December 21, 2009

Can you count on booze to kill the bugs in egg nog?

Can you count on booze to kill the bugs in egg nog?...

A perennial holiday dilemma: will alcohol kill the bacteria in homemade eggnog? Microbiologists Vince Fischetti and Raymond Schuch, from The Rockefeller University, ran an experiment in the lab to see whether salmonella can survive in a vat of spiked eggnog. Dr. Rebecca Lancefield's Eggnog Recipe.

Xmas-themed Lego ray gun

Flickr user Andrew Colunga describes this awesome Lego ray gun as "X-maspunk." [via Boing Boing]

December 16, 2009

Paper stars for Christmas lights

Recently, Ben Light, of BLight Design, did a workshop at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC on turning manila envelopes into stars to decorate holiday light strings. He has the star pattern and pics (as well as pics of the event) in his Flickr sets.

Building Star Light Minis

Recession Economy Gingerbread House

Artist Andrew Salomone has a new take on the traditional gingerbread house:

Abandonded Gingerbread House Building Sites is a site-specific project I made for my show, everything is as it seems to be, at The Space in Cork City [Ireland].

When the global economy unravelled last year the Irish countryside was left with a lot of empty, unsold, and unfinished housing estates. This holiday season I thought it would be nice to celebrate these unique landscapes by making them into picturesque gingerbread-house decorations that will rot and eventually be thrown out much like the unfinished housing estates themselves.

More Andrew Salomone:

Full-scale LED Christmas tree inspired by classic kit

MAKE subscriber Michael C. Reilly writes -

As a followup to our Geek Wreath from a few years ago, we decided to make a Geek Tree inspired by the velleman 3D tree kit. Construction was funded by our new company Neighborhood Workshop.

Nice. Added bonus - looks like it can fold up and be stored flat for next year. Anyone else expect to see a car battery used as a base? More pics and info on the construction process on Flickr.

In the Maker Shed:

3D Christmas Tree Kit

December 14, 2009

Beautifully minimal LED Advent wreath circuit and device

An "Advent wreath" is a horizontal wreath, traditionally with four candles which are lit successively to mark each of the four weeks of Advent in the liturgical calendar of some western-tradition Christian churches. Alexander Weber has produced an elegant little electronic version that uses 4 LEDs, a coin cell, a coin cell holder, a paperclip, and an 8-bit microcontroller chip. It is light-responsive, and uses one of the LEDs in "reverse" mode as a photodiode to detect darkness. The LEDs flicker, and the number of LEDs lit at any point is cycled by briefly cutting the power. Awesome design.