Making your Gingerbread House light up automatically when the room gets dark

We found the kit months ago, a ‘learning electronics’ available from the folks at Make. The ‘kit’ was a little paper cut out house that instead of having wires, had a pen that you used to draw circuits. The kits came with a little chip that ‘sees’ when the lights in the room are on, a couple little lights (LEDs), and a couple bits to power and control how the lights work. We of course got a kit (includes two houses) and painted them with color markers to look like little Gingerbread houses. A recent visit to the Bare Conductive site that makes the kit for Make looks to have had a similar idea:

The two house kit is available on Maker Shed’s site.

If you want to see what you will be doing with the kit before buying, here is the Bare Conductive Kit Instructions Page. This evening, we pulled apart one of our houses and are playing with putting the lights inside of one of the Gingerbread Men we built from our previous Cube print and fold craft post.

Gingerbread Fun to print, fold and enjoy

There is Gingerbread fun that doesn’t require an oven or anything editable. Yet, is still fun for the whole family or even around the office.

As you can see above, the cute little Gingerbread fellow is actually paper cubes. We found a site that has designs for two different Gingerbread men as well colorful packages. Just download the PDF and print to your local printer. We found the less expensive photo paper worked best for color and folding. Cutting is best done with a knife since the tabs interlock. Scissors can be used around the outer edge though so kids can do that part. Folding and assembly can be enjoyed by the whole family. For work, more precision can used with the knife and scoring lines prior to folding if the finished cubes will be on view of clients.

This is a image of the artwork you can download. Don’t use the  image as it is too low of resolution, go to the site to download the better PDF.

Gingerbread Man 1 site

Gingerbread Man 2 site

Fun elfs and packages

 

Running out of time to get the Gingerbread Man hat by the Holiday!

It’s coming down to the wire here folks!

Shopping around for the last minute gifts online means keeping an eye on the last possible order dates on sites to make sure the item will be delivered in time for the holiday. Make sure you know before you pay when the item is expected to ship and possibly when it will be delivered! We have been taken in with the ‘pay extra for second day air’ so we are sure to get the item in time, only to find out the provider doesn’t ship for another week.

A fun item for the Gingerbread Man fan on your Christmas list is the simple but dashing baseball cap. It’s a low model so it sit firmly on your head, available in three colors too. We have ours on when we head out shopping at the mall because we missed the deal online. Have fun!

 

Target offering more Gingerbread holiday fun…

Target keeps putting out more Gingerbread holiday items. I know we went down these isles before so they must be putting things out as they come in. Before we had found the little Gingerbread houses as well Gingerbread Women and Man on trays (Gingerbread sightings at Target, big find!)… now we find these cute little stuffed patchwork Gingerbread folks. Sorry the picture isn’t as clear as the shots we took earlier, the area was a mob of folks grabbing up things so supplies might be short this year if you wait very long.

Speaking of ‘short in supply’, last year we complained that everyone’s Gingerbread wrapping paper went out of stock way before wrapping time. We were overjoyed to see a nice supply in Target’s paper area this year… needless to say, we stocked up. We have a chance over the weekend, we’ll pull out the scraps from last year to let you know if the pattern has changed for this year.

 

Free Gingerbread Man art for phone skins

We put together some fun art to make vinyl stickers out of for our iPhones. These will fit a variety of other phones too. Since it didn’t cost us anything but a bit of time to put together, why not share with you to use… for free.

Just download these art works (right click and save to your desktop or folder on your computer). The Gingerbread Man image can be used for the back of your phone while the little Candy art will work best for the smaller parts on the front.*

After downloading, just go to a service like SkinIt or Unique Skins that allow you to upload your image to use on a vinyl sticker they will print for you. These stickers are a great way of protecting your phones from scratches too.

This is what these images will look like on a iPhone 4:

Free Shipping on all orders at Skinit! Code: FREESHIP

Quick and Easy to use, create your own Unique Skins

*Please, respect our hard work and only use our art creations for your own personal usage. We are not releasing them to be used for business use or for anyone to sell and profit. Thanks!