I’m back! Not sure where the time has gone but it’s been way too long since I’ve posted and I do apologize. If you’ve stuck around despite my absence, thank you ever so much! I can’t believe that November is here and that Hanukkah is right around the corner. It starts the evening of November 27th which means it is just over 3 weeks away! So time to start shopping and/or crafting some gifts! Today’s project is one that would be perfect for Hanukkah or really any gift-worthy occasion.
Tag Archives: Silhouette Cameo
Babies’ First Rosh Hashanah
I happen to know a whole bunch of babies celebrating their very first Rosh Hashanah and thought I’d add some holiday flair to their baby gifts. Continue reading
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The last lights of Hanukkah 2012
As Hanukkah 2012 draws to a close, I want to share one final Hanukkah project with you. As you are probably painfully aware, finding a Christmas T-shirt or pajamas (or anything) for kids is so easy but Hanukkah-wise, you’ll be lucky to find anything. Last year, I lucked out and found a “Dreidel Champion” T-shirt by Carter’s. This year, armed with my trusty Silhouette, I decided to make my own using simple Ts from Old Navy and a variety of vinyl.
First up is my own version of the “Dreidel Champion” for a friend’s son:
Now, love or hate the whole princess thing, we all know it’s popular with preschool girls. So, I decided why not embrace it and give it a new twist by creating a Dreidel Princess! For this shirt I used a combo of plain, glitter and flocked heat transfer vinyl as well as rhinestones of course. Next year I may need an adult version…
I had bought some purple foil star of david ribbon on one of my 1-800-Dreidel shopping trips and couldn’t resist the chance to use it for a matching bow. A little hot glue and a pony tail holder and I was in business.
Finally, for my own mini-mensch, I’d planned to do a collage of numbers since counting is rather popular in our house at the moment but he informed me that he wanted a menorah so a menorah he got. Using gold glitter vinyl and several shades of blue in plain and flocked, I created this “8 Crazy Nights” shirt.
He absolutely loved it (he wore it more than once!). I just can’t resist the chance to show off his Hanukkah (and all around) cuteness. Hope your Hanukkah was as full of sheer joy as mine!
As Hanukkah reminds us of the miracle of light, there are so many positive ways that we can channel our collective feelings of sorrow surrounding the Newtown tragedy. My heart aches for the families and I wanted to share one outlet that speaks to my creative side. One of my favorite crafty blogs, Damask Love has created a very special project to inspire healing through creativity. Check it out if you are looking for a non-traditional way to help.
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Fit for a Princess!
And the Wine Charm Giveaway Winner!
We had another 3rd birthday party to go to this past weekend, a princess themed one to be exact. So, I thought I’d use it as a chance to have a little more fun with T-shirt vinyl and rhinestones and make the birthday girl her own, very personalized tee.
I started with a cute girls’ tee from Old Navy – I’d show it to you but it’s not on their website anymore – why are plain kids’ tees so hard to find?! Then, I used the rhinestone template I created when working on my Queen Farmer Hat. Well, to be precise, I used the first template I created that was too big for the hat 🙂
I wanted to jazz it up a bit more so I free-handed a heart in the center and later aded pink jewels to the points.
Next I cut the word “Princess” out of pink glitter heat transfer using Silhouette Studio and the font Lavanderia Sturdy. I went with the lighter Lavanderia Regular and Lilac vinyl for the princess’ name. Then, I laid everything out on the shirt using a clear ruler to get things just so.
Then I carefully ironed each piece on one at a time, finishing with the crown so it would sit on top of the words in a few spots. The final result was just as I’d hoped it would be – fit for a princess!
And finally, the winner of the Shabbat Wine Charm giveaway is…Tina David Konegan! Mazel tov Tina! Email me your address so I can get your prize in the mail!
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Not Your Bubbe’s Hebrew {Font}!
Oh, I am so excited about this project I can hardly type! So, as you may have all figured out by now, I am totally in love with my Silhouette Cameo. It cuts paper and vinyl and fabric (though I haven’t tried that one yet) and best of all, it cuts any font! I knew even before I ordered it that I one of the things I wanted to be able to do try with it was cut Hebrew letters. Just think, the possibilities for Judaica projects or even every day projects with a jew-ish flare are endless! Here’s a little preview:
Silhouette Studio is the software that comes with the Silhouette that you can use to create whatever you are cutting. The tricky part is that it only supports English. So, here’s how to get cool Hebrew letters into Silhouette Studio (using Windows, sorry Mac folks) and cut out:
First of all, you may not know it, but many fonts you already own often contain Hebrew letters but using them can be a bit tricky since you aren’t sure where to find them, etc. So, my first recommendation is that you install the Hebrew keyboard in windows so that you can easily access the letters. This is really easy – here is a guide to adding input languages. I also recommend selecting that the language bar be docked in the taskbar so you can easily switch between languages when you are working. If you really want to make things easier on yourself, you can order some of these hebrew keyboard labels to doctor up your keyboard.
Then, open up a document in Microsoft Word, switch to Hebrew on your language bar and start typing. I am working on a gift for a friend who’s daughter’s Hebrew name is Morasha. Here you can see how it looks in several different fonts in Word. Remember, just like English, Hebrew comes in both block and script fonts. The standard ones that you probably have already, like Times, are pretty traditional (think prayerbook) Hebrew letters but there are some beautiful scripts out there that are really modern and chic. Here’s a good list. Of course, with these you can do all sorts of fun stuff using Word or whatever program you like!
Once you have your word or sentiment typed in Word, you’ll want to copy the word and then paste it into a blank Silhouette Studio document. When you first paste it, it will appear backwards like it is in this picture.
So, you’ll want to right-click and then select “Flip Horizontally” so that you can see what it looks like and play around with the fonts. The Hebrew fonts will show up on your font list in Silhouette Studio even though you can’t type in Hebrew in the program. I just love this “Dybbuk” font so after the flipping my word, I then selected a different font, sized it a bit and viola!
Now, since I am going to put this on a T-shirt, I will need to flip this again horizontally for cutting out of heat transfer so that it will be in the right direction when I iron it on. Don’t forget this step – I did the first time and cut it out in the wrong direction for ironing so sadly wasted some heat transfer material. For this project, I used the Silhouette grey flocked heat transfer. It looked great on the pink T!
But it would have been too plain to just have her Hebrew name all by itself, I needed to add some bling. So, using a combo of rhinestones from my Silhouette kit, I created a lovely rhinestone butterfly for Miss M!
The final product – a totally personalized Hebrew name T! Perhaps we’ll be lucky and Miss M will even model it for us!
Now that I know I can cut out Hebrew letters, what else should I make?? Any ideas? Ooh, so many possibilities…
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Happy Abba’s Day!
Happy Father’s Day! I am really excited to share the Father’s Day project I did for my husband. It isn’t jew-ish but it is definitely crafty. I read this Seattle Times article and decided that a fridge for the garage was a simply brilliant idea! But I couldn’t just get a fridge and be done with it. It needed some serious personalization. I knew that I wanted to created a cool sign for the fridge out of vinyl so I did that using my Silhouette Cameo.
This looks like it is relatively simple but looks can be deceiving! Each color (there are actually 4 here – red, white, silver and black) is a different die cut that had to be layered on top of the other. I had originally planned a 5th color – a dark grey background piece – but had some difficulties getting it smoothly onto the fridge so scrapped that.
I couldn’t stop there though. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to create some handy first aid for the garage. So, I got the pre-packaged band-aid kits at Costco and then added some magnet strips to the back using glue and then embellished the front with some more fun vinyl cut-outs.
I even decided to embellish the little bottle opener I got for the fridge with a little wrench cut of silver vinyl.
Here is the final result with all of the little details. And of course, it wouldn’t be complete without making sure it was fully stocked with my hubby’s (and son’s) favorite drinks! (Oh and a little ice pack in the freezer compartment for emergencies 🙂 He LOVES it! What did you give/get for father’s day?
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Farmer Queen
Today is the beginning of a new chapter for my friend Andie To celebrate her transition to full time farmerhood, I decided to make something befitting of her status as Queen Farmer; a woman who not only likes to dig in the dirt and hang with the animals, but do it with a little bling. You can read all about her adventures on Andie’s Farm.
Every good farmer needs to wear sun protection. So, I started with a nice simple cotton hat from Target. Then, I played with the layout I wanted in Silhouette Studio, keeping in mind the dimensions of the hat. I knew I wanted to overlay rhinestones over the word “farmer” so it took some fiddling around to get things laid out just right. Using flocked heat transfer, my first attempt with a different font choice (a version of Chevalier) was totally unsuccessful as the little stripes just came apart after I cut them with my Cameo. I ended up using a different font, the name of which is now totally escaping me. But remember when using heat transfer that you have to cut to the image in mirror so that when you iron it, it will read correctly.
As you can see, even this one proved a bit difficult with its delicate features but it ended up being easy to fix because the other thing I realized during this process is that laying a longer word across a curved hat is REALLY tricky. I ended up going with plan B and ironing it on one letter at a time (this also solved the problem of the “E” as all I had to do was re-cut a single “E”).
That worked much better!
Then it was time to figure out the rhinestones. I didn’t manage to photograph this process (probably because it was done in the midst of sick-toddler wrangling) but I used two different methods for the rhinestone designs. For the word “queen”, I used a rhinestone-specific font that came with the Rhinestone Starter Kit. For the tiara, I converted a standard graphic to a rhinestone design using the rhinestone tools feature (from the Silhouette Studio designer edition). A couple of the crown points were one stone off to me so I ended up adding a couple stones as I lay out all the rhinestones (pink ones for “queen” and clear for the tiara) onto the templates following the easy instructions in the starter kit. The final step was ironing them on the hat and ta-da: my one-of-a-kind “Queen Farmer” hat:
Happy farming Andie!
madebymamaleh 