Steve Hoefer whipped up these fabulous print-at-home Valentine's Day cards with particularly romantic patent illustrations. He writes:

For a maker Valentine's Day is no Halloween. Or even Christmas. In fact on the list of holidays makers get excited over Valentine's Day is near last, right between Leif Erikson Day and Flag day. And while those are all fine traditions, bu they rarely get people all excited about making stuff for them.

So, in an effort to turn that around I present, straight from the United States Patent Office, Maker Valentine's Day Cards.

What better way for a maker to celebrate Valentine's Day than with a celebration of romantic inventions and innovations from times past complete with illustrations.

#10

Firefly Workshop's pedal-powered snow plow

#9

Homemade snowmobile

#8

Snow bike kit

The bleak winter brings out the creativity in all of us, as evidenced by this snow rendition of Jabba the Hutt submitted by caffaknitted to the CRAFT Flickr Pool. Just one more Star Wars snow sculpture and I think we're onto a trend.

My friend, and MAKE contributor, Alden Hart created this unique holiday display for his house, using four TinyG boards controlling a total of 16 CNC axes, to animate 16 Christmas tree balls with LED throwies inside of them. As his business partner, Riley Porter, says on Flickr: "What the hey?" Riley and Alden are the wireheads behind the TinyG axis-motion controller board. They should have boards available for sale soon.

What is TinyG - and why?

Malmö, Sweden hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen ("The Research Department") celebrated the holiday with a little gingerbread, laser etched with some excellent ASCII art... and their founding date in hex, oh yeah!

Merry Christmas from all of your pals at Maker Media. We enjoyed collaborating with you all in 2010 and look forward to even bigger and better things in 2011. In the meantime, please enjoy this Max and Dave Fleischer Depression-era cartoon that so beautifully captures the spirit of a DIY Christmas. [Thanks, Laurie Stepp!]

Have a great holiday!

Hope everyone is having a fine Christmas eve. Here's a little holiday mood music, from our friends at ShopBot.
[Thanks, Bill Young!]

Johngineer writes:

My mother collects rocking horses. She tries to get at least one each year for Christmas. This year, she couldn't find anything she liked in the stores, so I made her one out of brass stock I had lying around.

I did a little CAD drawing to help myself visualize what it would look like. You might find it useful. There are very few dimensions, but you can still use it as a guide to bending the stock. The drawing is 1:1, so if you print out the PDF, you can just lay the bent metal on the paper to check the contour.

John Graham-Cumming, of Geek Atlas fame, has posted a piece to answer the perennial question "Why do Christmas lights all go out when one bulb blows?" (the old-school in-series non-LED variety). And he shows ye ol' "binary chop" technique for quickly rooting out the dead bulb.

Why do Christmas lights all go out when one bulb blows? (and how to find the broken one)

John Graham-Cumming, of Geek Atlas fame, has posted a piece to answer the perennial question "Why do Christmas lights all go out when one bulb blows?" (the old-school in-series non-LED variety). And he shows ye ol' "binary chop" technique for quickly rooting out the dead bulb.

Why do Christmas lights all go out when one bulb blows? (and how to find the broken one)