I WILL KNOT (www.iwillknot.com)
Learn how to tie a variety of popular and useful knots in the categories of stopper knots, hitches, loops and bends.
Click on thumbnails for the instruction pages, where you can watch a video clip with instructions broken down into step by step stages.
THEFUNTHEORY.COM (www.thefuntheory.com)
This site wants to encourage people to live a better and healthier life by making everyday activities more fun.
Take a look at this
altered staircase made to work like a piano - it aimed to make more people walk up the stairs, instead of using the escalator.
HUNKIN'S EXPERIMENTS (www.hunkinsexperiments.com)
Tim Hunkin is a cartoonist whose work appeared in the Observer for 14 years before he moved on to work in television. He has been a prolific artist over the years, and on this site he presents his kooky collection of experiments for the world to enjoy.
Now these are not high tech experiments, as the presentation would suggest. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and include such topics as making orange peel fangs and shadow portraits or perhaps you would rather grapple with the notion of creating your very own ant farm?
The charm is not so much the content, but the way it is delivered and if your young ones have inquiring minds they would probably enjoy doing some of the activities too.
Click 'About' at the top to learn more about Tim and his work. There are also links here to his other web pages, which are equally worth a visit if you like his cartooning style.
CRAFTBITS (www.craftbits.com)
Craftbits.com is a hobbyist's dream, crammed full of great projects, ideas and instructions. Project categories are listed on the left - or you can perform a search if you know what you are looking for.
They all use commonly available materials, and in many cases help you to recycle your old stuff into glorious gifts.
There are plenty of videos to watch if you prefer to be guided, and if you sign up for free membership you can save the projects you like and even submit your own ideas to help contribute to the site's content. It is a pretty popular place to visit with around 13,000 people clicking on these pages every day.
PSD.TUTSPLUS (http:/psd.tutsplus.com/)
Photoshop is one of the most popular and powerful graphics programmes around and psd.tutsplus.com is awash with great tutorials for it.
This blog style website has what looks like around 300 really in-depth tutorials teaching you how to create some pretty advanced stuff. The tutorials are all illustrated with screen shots and explained in a friendly and accessible way - even if you have little experience working with graphics programmes. Although complete beginners might want to start with something a little more basic at first.
These tutorials can be quite complex, but when you look at what you are creating that is not really a surprise. With links to cross reference effects from other tutorials, this site will help you execute some of the most advanced effects that the package can do. These are not five minute activities, but if you dedicate enough time to it you will be creating some simply stunning images.
ONE MILLION GIRAFFES (www.onemilliongiraffes.com)
A crazy idea can take shape and spread globally on the internet in just a matter of days and onemilliongiraffes.com is a great example of this.
The creator was having an argument with his friend Jorgan about whether he could collect one million giraffes by 2011. Why? Who knows? The result is the cutest and most random collection of giraffes.
At the time of writing, he has 985,947 giraffes to go in just 540 days. The only rule is that you cannot create your giraffe on your PC. Even if you do not want to contribute to the project, just browsing through the giraffes using the random giraffe button is a journey in itself.
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