8/8
Finally...making an old book of Christmas carols usable!

I added tabs to all of my favorite carols, so that when my family is singing carols we can quickly find specific songs. 42 songs made the cut, roughly half of the songs in the book.

I color-code the tabs based on the key of each song, to know in advance their key (which makes sight-reading just a little bit easier). It’s also useful to see the handful of songs that are in a minor mode, as well as which songs modulate.

7/8
which I taped into rings for the sides.
(Half of the fun for the kids is guessing what might be inside each “tin” every day before they open them to find out, which meant each cut needed to be very precise.)

I wrapped some canning jar boxes to create a presentable home for the tins, and augmented them with some small black and gray jewelry bags just to mix things up. Each tin or bag has a small paper tag with the day of December. I’m hoping these will last for many years to come!

5/8
And since not all projects need to be polished to be fun, here are two very simple witches’ hats that I made for my kids. They were playing a Harry Potter inspired game of make-believe one day, and wanted hats in order to be “more proper witches”.

It turns out that if you cut out a brim from some paper, attach it to a paper cone, add a pipe cleaner for a strap, and add a few decorations with marker or stickers, you’ve got yourself a charming and decent-looking hat!

4/8
Next up are some silly Lego ornaments, which I received as a gift from my amazing colleagues at our annual holiday party.

I’ve only made half of them so far, I’m saving the rest to make with my two kids.

3/8
Second, some small paper globe ornaments!

These were incredibly fun to make, which consisted of simply printing out some pretty pictures and assembling the pattern into these two paper globes with scissors and glue.

These were designed by John Nelson, who has several great projects like these (along with the code if you want to customize your GIS imagery in any way).

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-living-atlas/mapping/make-this-weird-paper-globe-ornament-please/

2/8
I think we should celebrate the “act” of creating things, and the joy we can find in the process of making things with our hands (or inventing them with our imaginations), just as much as the finished products themselves.

First up, a ukelele...I made a ukelele this morning! 💥

I used a kit from the company KiwiCo, from their Eureka line of monthly projects. It wasn’t too complicated, and I now have a surprisingly functional ukelele that’s quite fun to play.