Is it a rainy day? Are the kids bored? Are you bored? Want to reuse some old junk you don't have the heart to throw away, or to learn how to fix something yourself? If you answered yes to any of these questions, visit a DIY website to learn all sorts of new ideas. Here are a few sites and projects from them to inspire you and make you feel a little like MacGyver.

Instructables

Instructables features featuring member created instructions, including DIY projects, written step by step with photos or sometime video. Some great projects include:

• How to use spaghetti to paint like Jackson Pollack


• Make your own light saber


• How to make an ottoman out of an old suitcase


• Recycling Plastic Shopping Bags into Yarn

Craftzine

The formerly-in-print Craft magazine now channels all of its energies and talents into its free online website. Projects include:

• How-To: Make a Laptop Bag Out of Fused Plastic Shopping Bags


• Soda Bottle Coin Purse


• Mending a moth-eaten cardigan


• How-To: Make a Kitchen Cupboard Message Center

Make-Stuff

Make-Stuff is for people who, you got it, like to make stuff! Sections include Kid’s Crafts, Recycling, and Holidays. There isn’t as much on this website and they don’t include photos. There are also some instructions available to those who have paid to become a premium member.

Ready-Made

Ready Made Magazine's website isnt' as good as the magazine itself, but has a section called “Project Archive” where you can search for project according to different categories like “Sew It”, “Reuse It”, and “Craft It”, and find complete instructions for great projects like:

• Kitchen Skin Care – make your own skin care products in your kitchen


• High Fidelity – Reuse a vintage radio to hide desktop speakers


• Stereo Lab – Recycling an old laptop to turn a built in stereo cabinet into an mp3 center


• Broken Flowers – Turning chipped dishes into showpieces

Have any favorite DIY sites or DIY projects to share? Tell us all in the comments!

On a trip home to Spokane, Washington, my friend Kate found an amazing, handmade mouse house at an estate sale. The house a transformed wooden box - probably an old gift box whose striped interior may have inspired the creation of the domicile. I imagine that a grandmother lovingly made the house for her grandchild, carefully sewing the mice (and a rabbit and small bear) tiny clothes (with trimmed hats and changes of clothes), wrapping little boxes in tinfoil and labeling them "peanut butter," "sugar crystals" and "ham sandwich," and constructing a canopied bed and vanity protruding from the wall. She found the tiniest painted china tea set I've ever seen to sit on a little sideboard, and included a set of metal outdoor furniture, and bunches of flowers for a garden. There’s even a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket and a tiny Christmas wreath for seasonal celebration. I wanted to share this little treasure with you. It’s not perfect at all - and so it's such a relief from holiday expectations. Maybe it will inspire you to make your own, imperfect and magical miniature home for (or with) a child.

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A reader emailed me to ask for suggestions for green holiday decorations, hopefully ones that she could make by recycling stacks of catalogs and magazines piling up. My mailbox has also been fuller than normal. Here are a few options for decorations you can make with those stacks of shiny colored papers.

Magazine Bead Garland

I first marveled at this paper craft at age five, when I would pour though my big 1970s craft book. It’s a great alternative to popcorn and cranberries--you won’t eat the craft materials, and the garland will last for years to come. I've also seen crafters use paper beads to make bowls and toys, so you could make paper-bead gifts for everyone on your list, if you're inspired.

Materials: Magazine pages; scissors; glue; toothpicks; fine string, thread, or fishing line; extra craft beads for decoration

Instructions:

• Cut strips from magazine. You cam measure them into perfect rectangles, which will make tubular beads, or cut them into long triangles, the length of the page, which I think make for more interesting beads.
  
• Starting with one end (the wider if you’re cutting triangles) of the picture, put a dab of glue on the outside (side to be rolled over).


• Roll the strip around the toothpick. The glue will hold the center together and the toothpick will allow room to string the beads together later.


• At the last 1/4 inch of the roll, put a dab of glue on the underside of the paper. This will keep the roll from coming apart.


• Remove toothpick and allow to dry.


• Repeat with other strips.


• String the beads, alternating between round craft beads and long magazine beads, onto a piece of string, thread, or fishing line.

Origami Garlands and Ornaments

I love the tradition of folding and stringing origami cranes for good luck. And there’s not need to buy special paper to make them. Use your junk mail, and string them as a holiday garlands, or using them individually as ornaments. See this site for great illustrations on many folds.

Wrapping Paper and Envelopes

This may seem too obvious, but magazines make attractive free wrapping paper for small boxes. (My sister and I try to one-up each other with clever links between wrapping and gift.) Use the paper shredder to turn magazines into pretty stuffing for boxes. You can also fold pages up to make one-of-a-kind (almost) envelopes. Use a glue stick to easily stick the envelope together.

Collage and Cards

If you like to collage or make cards, you may find it helpful to think of the catalogs or magazines not as images, but as fields of color that you can cut up and use as you would any sort of pretty paper. If you have one, set a bored child down with stack of catalogs, some scissors, and have them cut out and sort snippets of each color, making stacks of red, orange, yellow, etc. Collages made from these rips look especially interesting.

Do you have any other favorite paper-recycling holiday crafts?