How To: 13 Easy DIY Christmas Gifts That You Can Stuff in a Jar
If you happen to have a bunch of empty glass jars lying around your home, the gift-giving possibilities are endless.
If you happen to have a bunch of empty glass jars lying around your home, the gift-giving possibilities are endless.
Using water, nail polish, and a white ceramic mug, you can easily create your own artsy DIY coffee mug with a "watercolor" effect colored on its surface.
Making your own snow cone syrup requires only three ingredients: sugar, water, and a packet of your favorite Kool-Aid flavor. Simply combine sugar and water until it's boiling, then let it simmer for three minutes. Gradually add a packet of Kool-Aid until it's completely dissolved, then pour the syrup with a funnel into a separate container, which can then be chilled in a fridge until it's ready to use.
If you always carry earbuds with you in your purse or backpack, you can use simple household objects to prevent the cords from tangling up into knots.
If you are like most people and spend most of your day hunched over a computer, you may be experiencing soreness and pain in your neck muscles. Before you schedule an appointment with a chiropractor or massage therapist, try some of the DIY home remedies below to alleviate the pain.
Whether you want to prevent your cat from scratching up the couch or deter stray cats from using your front yard as their personal litter box, a DIY cat repellent spray can go a long way in keeping unwanted furry guests away.
Add new life to your old light bulbs by transforming them into a DIY light bulb aquarium. Using needle-nose pliers, a screwdriver, and a small hammer, you can remove the copper connector and other inner components from the light bulb to create a clear opening from the stem to within the bulb.
Need to heal your unsightly acne scars? For a quick and easy treatment, dab a little vitamin E gel onto affected area overnight daily until scars begin to fade. You can also use lemon juice, baking soda, aloe vera, and apple cider vinegar with honey.
If you ever want to make your own bouncy ball, all you need are basic white glue, borax, food coloring, cornstarch, and water.
Need to keep your favorite feline entertained at home? Using common household items lying around your bathroom or kitchen, you can craft together DIY cat toys that cost nothing to make and will provide endless entertainment for your favorite cat.
Got chapped lips? If you don't have any chapstick, you can use a variety of household or kitchen items to alleviate dry, flaky lips. Simply apply castor oil, almond oil, mango butter, beeswax, or milk cream onto lips as needed.
Need an instant headache cure? Grab a pencil from your drawer of office supplies and bite down on it (but not too hard). Tension headaches commonly occur from overexerting your jaw muscles, and biting down on a pencil is a quick way to relax them.
Got a stubborn splinter lodged into your finger? There are a number of ways you can remove it easily using materials found around your home. Elmer's glue, banana peels, eggshells, potatoes, and baking soda are all great at painlessly extracting those tiny pieces of wood, glass, or other material.
Do you use disposable wipes for cleaning dusty tables, dirty windows or removing make-up? Ditch the chemically-loaded store brands and make your own cheaper, non-toxic and super-easy DIY wipes at home.
Makeup can get expensive, but removing it from your eyes shouldn't have to be. Thankfully, some DIY eye makeup remover probably already exists in your refrigerator, kitchen pantry, or medicine cabinet.
If you ever need to get rid of static cling quickly while on the go, simply run the article of clothing through a metal hanger to dispel the static. You could also place lotion on your skin underneath the clothes you are wearing to get rid of the dryness that is causing the static cling.
Sick of the same boring, holiday-printed, gift wrapping paper for packaging your presents? Using spare cardboard, make a pyramid-shaped gift box for your unusually-shaped item. Or, transform your spare empty cereal boxes into fancy custom-made gift boxes.
Using an empty Gatorade bottle, empty 5 oz. food container, power drill, string, and some red nail polish, you can easily construct your own DIY hummingbird feeder in less than 10 minutes to attract hummingbirds to your own backyard garden.
Where one sees plastic garbage bags, I see living creatures soaring high in the windy skies—and you can too. The choice is completely yours. But, wouldn't it be nice to spare one trash bag the indignity of holding waste?
Got a dirty desktop computer or laptop screen? Mix together a solution of equal parts white vinegar and purified water and place solution in a spray bottle. Spray a clean cotton rag with the solution and gently wipe the screen for simple, streak-free cleaning. For a quick clean-up of dust particles that won't scratch the glass, use clean coffee filters or a dryer sheet.
DIY foldable table for small apartments and workshops. It has unique way of folding. This one is made from old computer desk. It is an easy do-it-yourself project, even for woodworking beginners. See whole tutorial here: Foldable table, recycling of old table.
So simple yet so brilliant: Designer Jung Soo Park found a way to improve a “run of the mill” hammer by incorporating a magnet at the end of the handle. It holds a few nails while you’re working and if you drop a few on the floor, the magnet makes it easier to pick them up.
If you're the kind of person who frequently does science experiments at home, you probably have a hot plate. But if you're more of an occasional amateur scientist (or just don't want to buy one), it's much easier to hack your own.
Everyone has taken a photo that didn't turn out quite right because of bad lighting or a flash that produced too much or too little light. A flash can make your subject look washed out, or even downright creepy with bright white skin and red eyes. But with a bounce wall, you can redirect the light to make it less harsh and reduce the shadows. It also means less demonic-looking cats. Bounce walls can be expensive, but David Hobby of Strobist made this DIY version that uses a wire hanger, some ...
The secret hideout - a thing of the past, a childhood luxury, an adult-less adventure. Those were the days. And remember the secret knock? The only way in. You either knew it or you didn't. The only way to keep the kids in and the grown-ups out.
Vintage Projects offers 100+ free plans for building all sorts of fun DIY projects spanning musical instruments, archery, boats, motorbikes, go carts, science experiments, telescopes, tractors, radios, and more.
Finally, a well designed solution to studio-style living. The Contortionist bicycle. London-native Dominic Hargreaves, unhappy with the available options, designed this folding bike himself (true DIY spirit).
Musical instruments are lots of fun but boy, they sure ain't cheap. Dennis Havlena (the internet's true DIY instrument king) demonstrates some dedicated yankee ingenuity with his homemade alternatives (aka poor man's instruments). Dennis has created hundreds of hybrid, folksy instruments including bagpipes, banjos, psalteries, didgeridoos, hang drums, and dulcimers.
Pie lollipops. The perfect snack. Forget settling on one slice, with the pie pop you can sample multiple flavors. Luxirare posted a beautifully photographed (somewhat) tutorial on how to make your own. Premade fillings, jarred like jam, enable you to make a wide variety in one batch. Check out the amazing photographs below; click through to Luxirare a few DIY text tips.
The Redneck Roller Coaster is the invention of Dave Rock, a Canadian garbage picker and nudist. He has also fathered many children, two of whom he 'made for lezbians'.
Nasty weather is bad enough when you drive, but if you ride your bike to school or work, it's really not a pleasant way to start the day. And if getting soaked isn't sufficient, a wet commute means your bike chain is going to be caked with mud and all kinds of other gross stuff.
One of the biggest downsides to having so many gadgets is that you never seem to have enough outlets to power them all. Most of us have a power strip or two to solve this problem, but Instructables user dlewisa wanted something a little nicer looking, so he built this DIY desktop power outlet. For the housing, dlewisa put together a small wooden box using a nail gun and wood glue. He used a sander to round off the corners, then filled in the gaps with wood filler and painted it. You could als...
If the annual tradition of buying a new wall calendar at a heavily discounted price at some mall kiosk by the end of January is not exactly your scene, then how about making your own nifty DIY wall calendar for 2013?
Got a bad sweat stain on the underarms of your light-colored clothing? You probably have something in your kitchen or medicine cabinet that will help get rid of the stain immediately. Aspirin, table salt, lemon juice, white vinegar, baking soda, and even meat tenderizer (make sure it is unseasoned!) are some of the many common household ingredients you can use to make your sweaty clothes look brand new again.
When you're shooting in the rain (or other extreme weather conditions), there's a lot more to think about since cameras and water don't exactly mix well. An umbrella will protect your gear, but unless you have someone to hold it for you, it can be a pain to use.
For some, Halloween is all about the candy. For others, it's more about causing trouble. There's nothing wrong with a good laugh, but no one wants to be the target of a prank that will entail lots of cleaning later.
Getting pulled over sucks, even when you're in a normal car. Just imagine how these teenagers felt when they were pulled over for driving their wooden car without a license! They also got a citation for not having a speedometer or side indicator lights, but if that's all that's keeping their DIY vehicle from being street legal, I'm already impressed. Photo by WTF.nl/Zaanstreek-Waterland Police
A beauty dish is a device that redistributes the flash on your camera to make the lighting more flattering in portraits. It's called a "beauty dish" because it's used most commonly in fashion and beauty photography.
If you don't smoke, your car's ashtray is probably either unused or, if you're like me, full of loose change. And if your car is older, unless you've installed one, it probably doesn't have a place for you to plug in your phone. This quick hack by Jalopnik's Jason Torchinsky will solve both of those problems by turning your ashtray into a simple DIY smartphone dock that will charge your phone and let you play music through your car's speakers. After removing and cleaning the ashtray, Jason to...
Love old-school games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, but don't have the extra space for an arcade machine? Get the best of both worlds (and save some cash) with this DIY Arcade Coffee Table built by Sam Wang. He started with just an ordinary IKEA table and drawers, then cut out a space for an LCD monitor. The controls (including joysticks!) are mounted on the drawers so that when they close, it just looks like a normal coffee table. Once everything was in place, he added a glass table top, ...