Super-Easy Shabbos / Yom Tov / Upsherin craft for no reason at all…

I’m toying with the idea of doing crafts at the upsherin this coming Sunday (don’t worry; you’re invited!) (but please RSVP).

So for boys, I wanted to decorate a yarmulke, because it seemed most fitting, even though the only yarmulkes capable of being decorated are the tacky white satin ones.  And I wanted to do challah covers for girls and/or anybody who doesn’t want to do a yarmulke.

But I wasn’t sure what to make it out of, so tonight at Dollarama, I splurged on a $2 white polyester tablecloth and cut a challah-cover shaped rectangle out of one corner.  Other than the fact that two edges are scallopped and two are fringed (I cut them myself), I think it looks pretty decent – for a kid craft.

 

Me, Naomi Rivka and Elisheva Chaya used various colours of Sharpies to make the design – it took about five minutes – and then I used my favourite craft-project-with-kids glue, Aleene’s Quick Grab Tacky Glue, to glue on strips of Dollarama ribbon. 

Ever had that experience of going somewhere to do crafts with kids and they have the cheapest glue and the kid makes the project in five minutes, leaving you to spend the next thirty minutes holding on the pom poms or google eyes or whatever?  Aleene’s Quick Grab.  I don’t know what’s in that stuff, but it sticks right away.  It doesn’t dry right away, so things are slightly repositionable, but it saves a ton of frustration with crafts that fall apart due to lack of Parental Clamping Diligence.

However – I only bought 3 x 4m = 12m of ribbon, and it seems like each challah cover this size will take almost 1.5m.  So I’ll probably need a couple more packages of ribbon if I go ahead with it.

The ribbon edging is slightly functional, too, by the way.  Because I am just cutting out rectangles, they will undoubtedly begin to fray, even without washing.  The line of glue/ribbon functions as a fray-check edging so the edge may look fringed but won’t utterly fall apart (unless you wash it in a machine), in which case I won’t vouch for it at all.

In a nice twist, both Naomi and Elisheva were more than satisfied with the results, making this an amazing, fast, all-ages craft.  And I like it because it’s an actual full-sized object that parents can really use on the Shabbos or Yom Tov table. 

If you have more than twenty seconds to decorate it, your child can take longer and do a better job (as opposed to Elisheva’s upside-down writing of “The Shabbos Queen"), and perhaps use fewer exclamation points, but because it uses Sharpies, it can fall well within the short attention span of “kid-at-party.”  Still don’t know if we’re going to do it, though, because I haven’t told my mother there are crafts involved, and it’s her house.