Birkat Chaverim Blog

I made this one with my daughter (she chose to do a cat) but prior to that we made some of these in my chug/class (I havent found the pictures yet! When I do Ill post them.) Continue reading »

Summer is a good time to post these two projects made by two girls in my class. First is a water scene made out of plastic bags and fimo. I thought it was really neat. She tested what happens when you iron plastic bags a little too long and then made use of the piece as the ocean. She didn’t have to. You can actually iron other pieces together but she liked the effect. The fimo was shaped using a mold I bought that made sea animal shapes. Continue reading »

Here’s a project made by one of the girls (age 12) in my chug. It was made several months ago out of recycled fabric. I have no idea where the beige came from but the lining is a tshirt. She cut the zipper down to size and thought out how she wanted to sew it since she wanted a lining. It came out rather nicely. Useful for storing tissues and money and such. She wanted to make something like this and we looked at a few possible ideas before she chose to do it this way. There was no pattern involved.

A while back I wrote a post about the book “Jeremiah Street” illustrated (with needle and thread) by Lena Guberman. If you are in the Rishon LTzion area in June there’s a group show, “Needle and Thread” and Lena’s work will be in it.

The exhibition will be at Gallerina gallery throughout June. There’s a few images from the exhibition at the gallery online.

Photo Copyright: Lena Guberman

This project is similar to the felt latkes we made for Chanukkah. Easy to do by hand or by machine. In the case of felt matzot, matzahs or matzos (choose your  preferred spelling ), they also need to be “browned”. We did this with brown felt marker but I kept thinking about using rectangular erasers and paint.

These are pretty self explanitory- cut matzah to taste (round, square, misshapen etc.) sew to taste (only around edges, in a spiral, whatever), decorate to taste, refine to taste.
See also:

Make your own Haggadah

Other people’s Pesach ideas

My chug is bursting with flowers these days, just in time for Tu B’shvat. The top one is a circle which the creator stitched around and then pulled to make it puffy. You can sort of see where the thread is pulled. She used felt as the center of the flower and attached it to a headband. Apparently it was extremely popular amongst her classmates but not so much with a teacher who felt it would be more appropriate for Shabbat then in conjunction with the school uniform.

Here’s a few more: Continue reading »

Tu B’shvat is really about figuring out a date for terumot and maasrot-tithing (old fruits versus new fruits, which year they are from so the fruit could be given to the correct recipients.) In the Bnei Akiva bencher, we actually do include the blessing recited when taking terumot and maasrot, but I didn’t really want to do a post about that. Its not very crafty. I also wasn’t really interested in doing something about Tu B’shvat seders or dried fruit. Instead, I’m thinking about flowers. Before fruits become fruit they start as flowers, so there you go.

My daughter and I made pipe cleaner flowers with stockings as a very simple no sew project. We did some experimenting with coloring the stockings but mostly we used the stockings as-is.

In the chug we also seem to be focusing on flowers lately. Here is one flower barrette one of our participants made.

She chose to make this barrette after we looked at a bunch of different designs and styles online. I found a tutorial of how to make this one (and of course I’m having trouble finding it again to post a link to it now.) The idea behind this one is to make four flower shapes with six petals, fold them over and attach them in the middle. That provides the depth. This participant chose to use two colors for variety. Other floral barrettes that have been made recently include another flower made of felt, but using overlapping flowers of different sizes and a large fabric flower for a headband. I’ll post images of those soon.

Here are two other sources for flower ideas:

Do it yourself alternative flower arrangements

And this youtube video on how to make flowers from dryer sheets:

Tutorial for a really cool tree and swing card made of paper discovered via Whipup

See also: Dried fruit “trees” and “flowers”

I have been meaning to post about this book for a long time but the Tenth of Tevet is appropriate due to the name of the book and the connection of the Prophet Jeremiah to the period of seige and destruction of Jerusalem.

This book has a much happier subject. I found it at Shavua hasefer (book week) this past year and immediately bought two copies and showed it to my class (doll clothing) for inspiration.  The book is called Rechov Yirmiyahu or Jeremiah Street and is written by Libi Daon and illustrated by Lena Guberman.
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I know the title starts with Scarves, and I’m including one photo of a scarf at the top, but I am going to start with the updates. Now that Chanukkah/Hanukkah is over we can get back to other topics. I have been working on a variety of graphic design projects but most are identity related and I’m not going to post any at this time.
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Tonight is the last night of Hanukkah/Chanukkah. I took some photos in the neighbourhood of traditional Jerusalem lamps or lamp boxes and I am including them in this post.

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