Tis the season! My family doesn't do lists for gifts, and I find it very hard to buy great gifts for other people. As a result, for the past few years, I've been making DIY gifts. This year, creating my gifts was fun, and I ended up with some cool projects, but I ran into many issues. All the final gifts should be able to be able to be made with minimal upfront cost, and maybe some basic graphic design. So, here's my documented experience.

Sister:

Plan A: LED Jewelrys

My first idea for a gift was based on a cool LED jewelry project I found by Jiri Praus. I started working on this in November. I designed it, soldered the brass rods, and then put in and soldered the LEDs. However, I couldn't get the design to fit and work well when adding a battery. I also seriously lack soldering skills, making doing many parts of this project very difficult. With finals at the end of the year for college, I didn't have time to continue working on it, so I had to abandon this idea.

Plan B: Wire-framed Photo

I thought the brass wires were cool from my original plan, so I came up with the idea of using the wires I had already bent and soldered as a photo frame by gluing the photos to the wires. The first attempt at getting it to work was ok, but the glue caused fingerprints to appear on the photos. So, I reprinted the photos and put tape all over the top of the photos before using gorilla glue to stick the photos to the rods. While the tape with the glue was an absolute pain to take off, I feel ok with the result.



After getting the gift, my sister said she'd like to put magnets on the backs of the photos so that she could put them on a fridge or with other magnets. I agree that this adds an excellent final touch to the gift.

Mom:

Plan A: 3D Printed Custom Plant Pot

This was one of the ideas I was most excited to create. My mom has countless plants at home and loves Peru, so I planned to take designs from the Nazca lines made by the Incas in Peru and incorporate them into a plant pot.

Plan B: Plant Wire Decoration

It was the night of December 22nd, and I was frantically searching for another gift idea for my mom when I came across an article that showed an awesome plant decoration. I didn't read the article, but I figured I could make it. I first went into Adobe Illustrator and, I typed out my desired text and found a font that I could trace. One said love, another amor (love in Spanish), and the last said planta (plant in Spanish). Luckily, my dad had some spare wire I could use, so, I printed my designs on paper and bent the wire with my hands and pliers for the very acute angles to trace out what I had on paper. I also found taping the wire to the paper to be very helpful in holding things down while working. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Dad:

Plan A: Programmable LED lights

Honestly, I don't know why I thought this would be a good present. I got these programmable lights from Ada Fruit, and I thought I could program the lights to show a message like "Love you Dad" and stuff like that. However, 30 LEDs do not give you enough resolution to write out any messages. Even though it's cool to program LEDs, I realized this was more a project I wanted to do rather than a good gift for my father, especially since I couldn't program any messages.

Plan B: Epoxy Bookmarks

I came across resin bookmarks in this article, and thought I could put my own spin on them. The plan was to 3d print a guitar and bike, two important activities to my dad. However, with my printer unable to do the required 10-minute print successfully, I had to do something else. My next best idea was to use the notebook covers of some old notebooks and cut out my designs from there. I printed the designs on paper and then used that as an outline when cutting out the notebooks. Finally, I mixed, poured, and waited for the final product to solidify. I found that the resin tends to get everywhere, and accidentally ingesting it is really bad for you, so I used disposable gloves and 2 layers of paper towels around my workspace. From there, though I had some bubbles, the process was pretty straightforward.

Final Thoughts

It was fun to do all of these projects, but it was very stressful and took a lot of time as I navigated through many ideas and problems. Upon receiving the gifts, everyone seemed very appreciative and touched by the personalization and time spent on each project. Send me any questions if you want to do any of these yourself.

- Marius