DIY Holiday Gift Ideas

The holiday shopping season kicked off better than expected last Friday. If you still have names to cross off your list, consider skipping the big-box department store and making something by hand.

The website Instructables.com has thousands of craft ideas you can browse through. The site is a magnet for DIY enthusiasts who post detailed instructions for personal projects, from making a wallet out of computer circuit boards, to origami roses made from duct tape. Now, a new book, The Best of Instructables, Volume One: DIY Projects From the World’s Biggest Show and Tell turns those posts into pages. The website has about 18,500 projects, which they've narrowed down to a little over 120 for this book.

We invited Eric Wilhelm, founder of Instructables.com to join us with some ideas, including a marshmallow shooter, an "invisible bookshelf," an arc light reactor inspired by the movie Iron Man, and an iPod speaker made out of a Hallmark music card and a cereal box.

And if you’re in Boston this coming Sunday it’d be worth dropping by the Bazaar Bizarre, Boston’s annual DIY holiday craft fair. It’s held at the Castle at Park Plaza between noon and 7 pm.