Instead of a quaint “Home Sweet Home” cross-stitch pattern hanging in her living room, iOS and game developer Glenda Adams has a pixel-perfect recreation of the original Mac OS control panel, which she painstakingly hand-stitched over six months.
If you consider yourself a master of the yarn but have grown tired of knitting socks, sweaters, and scarves, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Textiles Lab are about to breath new life into your craft with software that can turn almost any 3D model into a knitting pattern.
It took Antonio Stradivari months to create one of his instrumental masterpieces, but you can make yourself a tiny wooden violin in just a few hours using popsicle sticks, toothpicks, coffee stirrers, and string. It can’t be used to play Mozart, but you can still pretend to play it whenever your friends start…
A pipe organ can cost more than $200,000 and weigh thousands of pounds. Not this instrument. The paper organ built by master craftsman Aliaksei Zholner costs and weights only a fraction of that—and it works just like the real thing.
Cardboard has long served as an inexpensive plaything for cats. It’s a cheap material you can use to build a climbing structure, or a cozy place for them to hide. Far from a weekend craft project, these cardboard landmarks won’t be an eyesore sitting in the corner of your living room.
If you’re going to bother tackling a craft project, it might as well do something interesting when you’re done with it. Aliaksei Zholner used his skills with paper and glue to build a working Stirling engine powered by a bowl of hot water and a handful of ice cubes.
Making handmade goods might be the easy part when you consider all the work that goes into selling those products online. Now Etsy is giving its sellers a new tool for building a standalone website that easily populates with data from Etsy’s own online marketplace, making launching and maintaining an e-commerce site a…
Making crafts? Nice. Got a glue gun? Awesome. Only one? Crap. When you have a lot of glue sticks but only one gun to load ‘em in, just grab some soda cans, some tape, and a lighter to make your own homemade glue gun. MrGear shows how in the video below. From the looks of it, it works pretty damn well and there’s…
How’s a guy supposed to blow up the Death Star from the comfort of his own couch? Naturally, through the ancient Jedi technique of crochet.
The internet brought countless innovations to the world, one of which being the ability to pawn off hard work onto someone else, anywhere on earth, for a price. For example, if you need 500 paper airplanes but don’t want to waste hours folding them, you can now just buy them in bulk.
A velvet-voiced Australian craftsman named Chris is the Bob Ross of clock-making. He shows you how to make a skeleton clock from scratch at home on his YouTube channel, Clickspring. In this installment of a multi-part series, bask in the close-ups of brass melting away like golden velvet to make shiny washers and…
It’s a good day to be frustrated with something ridiculous your parents did, because Marieke Voorsluijs will help put it in perspective. Frustrated with her teenage son’s reluctance to cuddle, she created a knitted doppleganger of him that makes whatever stupid thing your parents did seem not so terrible.
Feeling extra-confident in your crafting skills after knitting yourself a pair of Netflix-pausing socks? Take your newfound skills to the next level by now making yourself a comfy cozy scarf that not only looks like a giant thermometer around your neck, it works like one too.
Dear robots of the world, don’t for a second think you’re fooling us with adorable demonstrations of your crafting capabilities this holiday season. Because one second you’re making paper snowflakes, and the next you’re using those same scissors to usurp your human handlers. We’re on to you!
In the blink of an eye, episode one of a Netflix series can turn into episode 20 if you’ve fallen asleep at the remote. To help combat this, Netflix has developed a pair of knitted socks you can make yourself that automatically pause your show when they detect you’ve nodded off.
The real thing can weigh upwards of 600 pounds, but the V8 engine Aliaksei Zholner built would barely register on a scale because it’s only slightly larger than a ping-pong ball and made from nothing but paper and glue.
If sparklers are the most dangerous type of pyrotechnics you’ve ever dabbled with, it’s time to up your game with a homemade flamethrower that brings even more spectacle to your next backyard BBQ with rainbow-colored flames.
Remember how elated you were when Mattel announced it would be releasing a replica of the hoverboard from Back to the Future 2? And then how sad you were when it was priced at $120? Now you can just build one yourself with this handy tutorial and about $50 worth of random supplies.
There’s always some added level of satisfaction when you build something yourself. So instead of spending money on a model of the BTTF DeLorean assembled in an overseas factory, here’s a simple tutorial—courtesy of Dave Hax—that will show you how to build one from scratch using a couple of empty Pepsi cans and other…
