Man Made DIY

You know that spindle-y, cotton-y, faux spider web material they sell in the plastic bags?

I hate that stuff. First, it's gross and creepy; as in, not a cool, eerie Halloween way, but in a octogenarian's chin hair kinda way. And, it's nearly always misused to create a melty cotton ball look that looks nothing like an actual spider web.

But, this process it pretty intriguing. A special balloon-strengthening product called HI-FLOAT is allowed to dry inside an inflated then deflated ballon, and upon re-inflation, produces a string-y, bizarre, somewhat similar to an spider web looking thing, which, when combined with a few plastic creepy crawlers, looks… read more

For contemporary crafters, the old script-y, serif-y cross stitch alphabets simply won't do. So, Tamara Maynes has created the Helvetica Cross Stitch kit, an A-to-Z cross stitch design chart that allows you to incorporate the Swiss school classic and the world's most popular typeface into your handmade… read more

I got The Amazing Apple Book as a gift for the Christmas of '92, and I adored each of its pages. I learned about how there's no way the fruit from Adam and Eve was an apple, and all sorts of culinary applications. But my favorite project included carving a face in a fresh, ripe apple and leaving it out to dry and shrivel into a little fruit flavored shrunken face...though my parents always made me store mine in the basement, and they usually caught a coat of… read more

Awkward title, I know, but it's kinda difficult to actually describe what's happening here. The World Woods Library is an effort to help folks collect a diverse catalog of wood species, a xylarium, in the form of wooden books.

Each species gets its own edition, with the English name carved into the spine, and the Latin genus and species on the… read more

Giant LEGO storage boxes? Who wouldn't wanna store their stuff inside an oversized, stacking modular toy?

"Our neat new giant LEGO storage brick boxes have been made especially for STORE under licence from LEGO themselves and just like the original LEGO bricks, each storage box can be clicked together and then stacked to create a giant LEGO structure but with the added benefit of storage… read more

Oh, my.

Armed with a post-it note of inspiration and an appendage-shaped gelatin mold, Megan from NotMartha has made herself a hand. Of meat. With fingernails. And a wrist bone. It's awe-quaking. And perfectly… read more

Great Scott! An electrified DeLorean DMC-12 is getting ready to cruise through the hills of Italy to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of Back to the Future. Well, almost...

"Technically, a complete electric DeLorean is about a week in the future. Right now they’ve got a garage full of a DeLorean shipped over from Dallas and a turnkey electric car conversion kit that includes 1.21 gigawatt 90 kW engine and custom designed Lithium-ion batteries that fit the DMC-12… read more

Sculptor Patrick Dougherty creates impressive, architectural art pieces exclusively from found stick, twigs, and stones. At 28, at home with two kids, he built his first piece, a log home. Then, "at 36, he went back to school, straight into the graduate art program at the University of North Carolina, 10 minutes away. His first stick work, a man-size tangle of saplings made on a picnic table at home, startled his professors, he said. They thought “it was too complete for someone who’d been blundering around in the netherworld.”

Since then, he has made well over 200 startling (and delightful) pieces for sites all over the world — woolly lairs and wild follies, gigantic snares, nests and cocoons, some woven into groves of trees, others lashed around… read more

Gene created this very high-end looking built in home office...from IKEA pieces. The Brooklyn-based creative director and passionate collector used BESTA cabinet and NUMERÄR countertops to make this very mod home office for not a ton of money.

When I was a kid, we made secret book hiding spots all the time: glue up the edges, grab the utility knife, and spend hours cutting. Of course, we didn't have any stuff worth hiding, but we were boys, and that's what boys did.

I love the idea of using secondhand books as a gift box, but my memories of the tried-and-true handcutting method, which would take more than an hour for a book big enough to put much in, make me think otherwise. But, this new method from John Park makes me think I might be able to pull it off this holiday… read more