3 Ryobi Must Haves For The Holiday Craft Season

Sprucing up your home with festive decorations certainly adds to the holiday cheer, but buying premade decorations can get pretty expensive. Making them is also a lot of fun! That's a big part of why so many people choose to deck the halls with homemade crafts. Making your own holiday decorations is also a time-honored tradition, and there are so many different kinds of things you can create to ornament your home, from paper snowflakes and Santas to hand-carved dreidels and nutcrackers. There's only so much you can make with safety scissors and Elmer's glue, though. Those who want to get serious about their holiday decorations will probably need to invest in a few tools.

The Home Depot exclusive power tool company, Ryobi, actually has an entire lineup of products that make perfect additions to any home crafter's arsenal. I am a huge fan of DIY and have used more than a few Ryobi tools in my time. The company manufactures items that are useful for everything from paper and foam crafts to woodworking and electronics. Some of them might be a little heavy-duty for the average home decorator, but there are a few absolute must-haves that are useful in all kinds of festive projects. Here are three of the best products Ryobi makes that can help you step up your home decor game this holiday season.

The humble glue gun is a cornerstone of crafting. In fact, it's so prolific that many people might see it as a pretty ordinary piece of equipment. How complicated is a metal dispenser that heats glue, after all? But experienced crafters will tell you that a good hot glue applicator can be the difference between discreetly assembled decorations and a stringy mess of lumpy rubber.

The Ryobi 18V One+ Glue Gun Kit has a compact, lightweight design that makes it easy to use and get into difficult places. It's also completely cordless, powered instead by the company's trademarked One+ battery system. So, not only does this tool give you a wider range of movement, but the battery can be swapped out with any other 18V One+ battery. That's a particularly nice feature for those who already collect Ryobi power tools.

According to the product description, the gun heats up in under three minutes and is designed to handle heavy-duty gluing applications. It works with full-sized half-inch glue sticks and is also compatible with higher-grade adhesives than those typically found in craft stores. It's a bit more expensive than the average glue gun, but the kit includes a battery and charger. There is also a three-piece set of different-sized nozzles designed to go with the gun, which is sold separately.

Foam can be messy and difficult to work with if you don't have the right tools. You can cut it in straight lines with a razor blade well enough, but it's difficult to carve or get any kind of decent curved cuts with cold steel. To really make the most of foam crafting, you have to be able to apply some heat. That's where Ryobi's USB Lithium Foam Cutter Kit comes in. This kit is one of several new products that Ryobi has just introduced. It's a USB-charged cordless tool that generates heat, which is then conducted into several attachments designed for cutting and shaping foam.

The first is the Hot Wire Tip, which is essentially a metal wire strung between two prongs. The wire conducts heat from the prongs, and that heat allows it to cut and shape foam like butter. Then there is the Holing Tip, which is designed to easily cut holes into the middle of foam, and the Precision Engraving Tip, which is used to etch out finer details.

The cutter tool is compatible with Ryobi's Hobby Station, and the company also sells a two-piece kit, including a Scooping and Blade tip, that fits the cutter separately. Each of these different attachments adds utility to the tool so that it can cut and shape foam cleanly and in all kinds of creative ways.

The product description states that it heats up in under two minutes and that it works on a variety of different kinds of foam, including upholstery foam, styrofoam, and firm insulating foam.

Rotary tools are most well-known for their woodworking applications, but they're useful for all kinds of things. They can be used for carving, cutting, routing, sanding, buffing, polishing, burnishing, cleaning, and countless other applications. In fact, there are hundreds of attachments out there for rotary tools, and their uses are only truly limited by the creativity of the person wielding them.

Ryobi makes a device called the 18V One+ Rotary Tool Station Kit. This is an interesting tool because it is sort of a hybrid between wired and cordless. The tool itself has a cable connecting it to a small box station that is powered by one of Ryobi's 18V 2Ah One+ batteries. This means that you will have to deal with a cable coming off the back of the pen-like rotary tool, but it also allows the tool itself to be smaller and lighter while the station can be moved to any location you want without needing a power outlet.

It also allows it to run on a much more powerful battery than those in tools like Ryobi's USB Lithium Rotary Tool Kit. This gives the Rotary Tool Station a lot more power, which the product description states is controlled via "a variable speed dial that allows users to choose from 5,000 – 35,000 Rated RPM." The kit comes with 35 attachments to get you started, and the tool has a Quick Change Collet to make switching between them easy.