Passover Craft Designs 2011

Passover Craft Designs 2011, a group on Flickr.

Share your designs in this group pool!

Passover Kitch

I started looking a few days ago for some fun projects for Passover. I have to admit, the search for Passover crafts was inspired by the Peeps bunting which is completely adorable and posted everywhere. Why doesn't Passover have a cute little pink bunny as its symbol? We've got some much more difficult material to work with! Didn't find what I was looking for in my searches- I found a bunch of Matzoh covers (which we've been making since pre-school) and the like. I hope I've come up with a few new, fun projects for you to do for Passover.
Pillows! Perfect for leaning on during Seder. From my fave songs Diyanu! and Chad Gadya.


A faux seder plate- perfect for an April Fool's Day post! Using only candy as ingredients, this seder plate definitely is not kosher for Pesach! Do you think it resembles the real thing?


Since banners/bunting are so popular, I wanted to make one. But what to include? I settled on my favorite Pesach haiku....


These guys are probably my favorite, they're the AFIKO MEN! A group of Passover Superheroes ready to fly in & entertain your little one during Seder.

I do have a few sets of the Afikomen for sale on Etsy with a link on the left sidebar.

Pillow instructions!
To make the pillows I used a freezer paper stencil method. I searched Google images for a picture of a goat I liked and printed it out. Then I traced it onto the dull side of a piece of freezer paper. I cut it out with an exacto and ironed it onto my fabric. I stippled two coats of fabric paint, let it dry and peeled off my freezer paper. I did the same basic method for the lettering, just picked out the font and size I wanted and printed it off my computer.
You can use a pre-made pillow cover to keep things simple! I sewed a simple envelope pillow cover, since I already had the form, for the Chad Gadya pillow, but for Di-diyanu I just cut a size I liked and sewed three sides, the stuffed it and sewed it shut.
You can do this with any Passover saying or image! "Next year in Jerusalem", "goat for sale, two zuzim", "ma nishtanah...".

Faux Seder Plate!
This is a great learning tool for kids and so much fun! My kids love looking at my cupcake decorating book which uses all candy materials to make different animals or figures. This is the same idea.

The egg is made from Wilton white melting candy. I actually used an egg form, which I sprayed with Pam, poured in the melted candy and swirled it around while it hardened. I was having a hard time getting the egg out of its mold, so I dipped one end in a bowl of warm water and that loosened it right up!

The shank bone is rice krispy treat which I molded by hand, then I held a few matches to it to give it the roasted look.

I went a little nuts (no pun intended) on the charosis. How do you mimic apples and nuts and wine? Well, I just decided to go for it and throw a bunch of stuff on there. I tinted some frosting to Manaschevitz color, then threw on some chopped red tootsie rolls (for apples), M&Ms, and chocolate. Well... I tried!

The maror is a slice jumbo-sized marshmallow dipped into non-pareils.

For bitter herbs I decided that rather than another leafy green, I'd make some salt water, with a stem coming out. I didn't actually make any cupcakes though (cheater, I know!) I just used a few ritz crackers on the base and mixed blue food coloring with store bought frosting. There were a lot of elements to this seder plate! I was saving time whenever possible.

I probably had the most fun making the parsley. I used green lime flavored tootsie rolls and tropical flavored fruit roll ups! I used a rolling pin to roll the tootsie roll flat, and a sharp knife to cut out the shape I wanted from it and also the fruit roll ups.

I set up a group on Flickr.com with close ups of each of the items. I hope you'll use some of my ideas, or use them to create new ones for yourself and have fun making some Passover kitch :) Would love to hear from you or see pictures of what you've made!

New Life For Old T-shirt

There was a huge stain on the front of my son's shirt. It was the kind of stain that maybe you couldn't see in certain light... so for months he's been wearing it anyway because I always forgot to throw it away. Last week while he napped I cut off the front pocket and sewed it to his t-shirt quilt. He loved it!! But today, suddenly, it's pretty much the end of the world that Mommy cut up his favorite race car t-shirt. How could I do this to him?? Luckily, I didn't throw away the rest of the shirt yet. So I fixed it. And I love it. And maybe I'll still be sewing this race car onto t-shirts for him when he's my age.

Craft Show

It's been awhile, but if I don't post now I never will and it'll be lost forever. So, just for the record, I'm posting pictures of my display at my first craft show which was August 14th. And it was pretty successful! The turn out wasn't great, but I had most of the sales for the day and ended up having fun and being pretty proud.




My thoughts following the show were that I'd definitely do it again, and that I'd spend LESS time preparing for it!

Pretty As A Picture

Freezer paper stencils are one of my favorite super-easy super-quick transformation crafts. We all know, by now, that my favorite crafts are ones I can do quickly! Screen printing makes a pretty big mess, and it doesn't make much sense to do all the prep work for just one print. On to the freezer paper stencils.

I loved a tunic from Mini Boden, but after weighing whether I wanted to pay $30 for it or try to recreate it... a trip to Target and one day later and I have something similar that I made!

I even cheated a little bit for this one. Usually if I'm doing freezer paper stencils, at least I want it to be my own design. But I thought this bow was so cute, I just printed out the picture, blew it up and traced it. So bad, I know. But it's cute, huh?

If you want to see the tunic, I fell in love with for Margot, it's here. Why don't they make this in adult sizes?

If you've never tried a freezer paper stencil, you totally should! Here's an easy tutorial on how it's done by one of my favorite bloggers, Amy Karol.

Another by the way, my vintage spool dolls are listed now on Etsy! You can see a preview on the column to the left, and click to view. Hope you like them!

Light Box

For the last month or two I've been trying my hand at selling all kinds of stuff in all kinds of places. I've spent many hours taking pictures and posting on Ebay and Etsy, and I think it's FUN!

My crafting world was expanded a week or two ago, when I found dozens and dozens of vintage wooden spools at my favorite treasure hunting store. Since then I've been all about the spool dollies, a.k.a."Spoolies"! They are greatly inspired by my friend Dannielle's gorgeous bendy dolls, which you can see by clicking HERE. I want to put some of my spoolies on Etsy but they're just not coming out well in my pictures! I would love to have a fancy camera, but I don't.

So I found THESE instructions on making a light box. Here's the results. It doesn't look so nice, but I think it works! And also, here's a sneak peak at the Spoolies.





Cute little Harry Potter!
Not-so-creepy Halloween girl.

Now that I have this light box, it will obviously start a flurry of buying off of my Etsy site :) The Spoolies are pretty cute though, and I can personalize then with colors and names. My favorite part though, is preserving the vintage spool labels!

By the way, when I do put them in my Etsy shop, you'll be able to see them there in the bar to the left and get there just by clicking on the pictures. Let me know what you think!

Hoorah!

A very talented person picked my listing to be in THIS awesome Etsy treasury! The red & white striped straws do it again.

Capelet

Fell in love with this capelet from Prudent Baby. Even the fabric from Heather Ross Far Far Away II. I spent as much money on this fabric as I ever have, making it even more painful when I cut one of the pieces upside down! Anyway, it's beautiful!! I hope my beautiful little girl loves it too.

Baby Bell

My neighbors and good friends The Bells are having their first baby in October! A little boy. They are great people - she was born and raised about an hour away from me, they moved across the street from us from the same city in VA we moved here from, and they let us swim in their pool. These are just a few reasons we like them. They are both Air Force folks, and have a little airplane theme going in the nursery. So off 'a quilting I went. And I even remembered to take pictures before packaging it up to deliver at her shower!



It is harder for me to give some things up, than I'd like to admit. I'm short on quilting time these days, and it takes a lot of time and I put a lot of myself into making a quilt. When I had just started and all I had was mountains and sky, I really wanted to put a big star on top of the mountain and keep the quilt for myself! But I resisted. And I hope Baby Bell and his parents love the blankie.

Crawfish Boil V

Welcome to pictures from our 5th annual Crawfish Boil! Our Boil (pronounced something like booowl), which started as a fundraiser a few months after Katrina, has moved with us from Virginia to Missouri. It was a little fancier this year than our first mosquito infested (albeit authentic) Boil locale. Still, we haven't forgotten to basics: pinch, twist and suck, and "don't eat da straight ones"!