In the final weeks of 2012, we asked our listeners for their creative New Year’s resolutions. Kurt Andersen is choosing projects to check in on during the year. Last week, he spoke with Michael Relland, an elementary school band and orchestra teacher in Phoenix who has resolved to tackle Bach’s cello suites and perform them at a solo recital.

This week, Kurt calls Ariel Lautman, a full-time mom in Silver Spring, Maryland, who has resolved this year to use the circular saw she got as a wedding present to build furniture. “I started thinking about all of the chemicals and everything that goes into premade furniture and I really don’t want that in my kid’s room,” she tells Kurt. Ariel admits her last woodshop class was in middle school, but she’d rather learn on YouTube than in a classroom: “I have a couple of people I can talk to if I run into problems, but I’m hoping to be able to teach myself most of it.”

Charlie Capp recently moved to Seattle from Montana to pursue a career in art. While job hunting, Charlie wants to illustrate a comic book adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (see a slideshow of his work so far below.) “It’s kind of a Twilight Zone story — it’s got a sea voyage, some supernatural imagery, and there’s a proto-environmental moral to it.” Charlie plans to illustrate one stanza per page, for an estimated total of 150 pages. Charlie plans to illustrate one stanza per page. One down, 143 to go.

Slideshow: Work in progress — Charlie Capp’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner