For the person who: loves
Lo-Fi Girl, festivals, and is drawn to LEDs like a moth to a flame
Get them: wearable LEDs & LED art!
- CaliforniaSTEAM makes beautiful light-up earrings and jewelry, all powered by rechargeable supercapacitors
- Evil Genius Labs makes mesmerizing wall art with fibonacci spirals
- The Lux Lavalier is a pendant that will be a talking piece whenever you wear it, and is a collaboration between friends of ours
- TechnoChic's DIY LED Pin kits let you add a pretty rainbow LED to any old craft supply without any soldering and her Bowtie Kits do the same but give you 10 shiny paper bows/bowties to adorn!
- Our friend Claire's LED guide is a great starting place for anyone wanting to get into making things with LEDs, the guide is free and you can support her work via Patreon
- And if that friend is ready to make some blinky lights, get them a Pixelblaze, the best and most capable LED controller out there.
For the person who: just got a soldering iron and is now soldering ALL THE THINGS
Get them: more soldering kits!
- MakerQueenAU kits - our friend Steph makes gorgeous soldering kits that look like enameled pins.
- Learn to Solder kits - our friend Emma makes these great kits, Jitterbug is our favorite!
- Alpenglow kits - we're closing ours out, so they're still at 50% off while supplies last!
For the person who: loves zines and coloring books
Get them: zines and coloring books about electronics
- leeborg's zines are great intros to different electronics concepts and components (will ship as soon as Canadian postal strike is resolved)
- Steph's Skillseeker book - published by Make, this contains awesome charts that you can color in to display your skill level on a topic, and get ideas of new ones to develop!
For the person who: is obsessed with
Klangphonics and can't get enough of those old Nintendo game sounds
Get them: their own bleeps and bloops
- Oskitone makes super fun & playful DIY synthesizers
- Thea of Winterbloom makes wacky and cool modular synth panels
For the person who: is always putting wires and random circuit boards together and making weird devices
Get them: cool prototyping tools!
- Our SwitchTrick breadboard power supply can power a bunch of different projects with its selectable voltage
- Speaking of breadboards, the Jumperless is the highest-tech solderless breadboard around, make connections by simply touching sockets with a probe!
- leeborg's alligator clips bring fun tertiary colors to the typical primary/secondary alligator clip rainbow (again, pls allow extra time for shipping due to Canadian postal strike)
- Chloe's Flip C3 allows you to create off-grid home networks that don't need the cloud to make smart speakers play or your lights turn on.
- Great Scott Gadgets' Cynthion helps you make sense of the hell of USB development and testing
And last but definitely not least…
For the person who: is completely out of fucks
Give them: more fucks!
- the Alpenglow FUnicorn is the classiest way to give out fucks, completely with shiny gold unicorn and fancy cursive script that your kids won't be able to read
- if your friend won't shut the fuck up about their laser, get them some of the best fucking laser files out there by LaserKick (also Claire), so they can cut their own fucks all day long
Fun side note: when I asked my friends if they sold anything with the word “fuck” in it, several new brands and products were instantly born. So who knows, maybe soon there will be a Fuckerless, Bright Fuckables, CaliforniaFUCKs, Fuckonacci69, Fuckxelblaze (or Pixelfuck?), Fuck C3, and hopefully many more. I have the best friends.
