When I was unemployed, I spent a chunk of the time writing an open source project. I put it down on my resume as "Hobby project to hone skills in Ruby, Javascript, and HTML5 Canvas" and it ended up being the best demonstration of actual work I could share with my interviewer.
Same, I got my job based largely on the quality of my code which was created for a hobby project. Those who are hiring programmers love to see real work even if it was a hobby project. The quality of your code speaks for it's self.
