This year, our third season grapevine finally yielded fruit. 7 lbs! I picked them all at one go, and decided to have my hand at canning.
I followed the first grape jelly recipe that I found on the internet, which basically said to peel the grapes, cook the grapes for a few minutes, set [...]

Mark Frauenfelder linked to a really tasty looking “how to illustrate a glass of beer” Photoshop tutorial by Eren Göksel at PSDTUTS the other day. It looked so good, I just had to give it a whirl. No matter how much you use Photoshop, you can always learn a new trick, and Eren has [...]

So you’ve borrowed a video projector and you’re finally going to host that Don Knotts film festival that you’ve always talked about. Well, Cannonball Run II doesn’t look that great on a beige wall, and you don’t have any white sheets to hang. Rest easy, with a trip to the fabric store and [...]

I‘m kind of getting lightsabered out. I promise that this will be my last mention of them for a while.
But I did have some leftover lightsaber making supplies sitting around after Halloween, so I used them to build a “saber” that I could actually use. In place of the blade, I installed a [...]

A rebel x-wing pilot just doesn’t look right in tennis shoes. If your Halloween costume could benefit from a pair of jack boots, but you just don’t feel like forking over the $300, don’t despair. You can make a pair of decent-looking costume boot tops in pretty short order.

Make A Pattern
While wearing [...]

You say you need a yellow G for your Speed Racer costume but you couldn’t sew a stitch if your life depended on it? Rest easy, you can make jiffy iron-on letters using some felt and your hot-glue gun.

There is probably a pre-glued interfacing material made just for this purpose, but I didn’t know [...]

Getting tired of pin the tail on the donkey? Bowling alley booked? Well, we’ve found that newly-minted 5 year olds and friends like nothing more than to spend an hour decorating and launching their own water rockets.
We’ve thrown this party twice now, and it was blast both times.

Make The Rockets
Making the [...]

Whip up an impromptu set of lightsabers and have your little Jedi’s learning the way of the Force in minutes. We made up this set of dueling sabers with some garbage and literally about 2 minutes of work.
The tubes that we used are the cores that are left over when the plotter at work [...]

I just bought this gargantuan lens from American Science Surplus, and I recommend that you do the same as soon as possible.

Huge Lens
Even if you don’t plan to build a projector, telescope, or a big red pulsing HAL 9000 eye, you should pick up one of these lenses just to have sitting on your desk [...]

Got a spot that needs a set of concrete steps? Readymade wood stair stringers make great, easy forms for small concrete stair jobs. Intended for use as a structural part of wooden staicases, they also save you the brainwork of figuring out the proper rise and run when bulding forms for concrete steps.

I’m [...]