Adventures in Mama-Land

Do you have a stack of old, clean cotton hankies? Do you have an old t-shirt you can stand to cut up? If so, you have an INFINITE supply of no-sew homemade masks that are simple to put on and take off!!! Here in Israel, it is literally illegal to go out without wearing a mask.  It doesn’t have to be a super-duper high-tech N95 respirator / filter mask.  Any old shmatta will do.  And that’s where this hankie mask comes in. Do homemade masks work? First of all, this mask has absolutely ZERO antiviral or antibacterial properties.  It just stops us from being human together, and helps me feel like part of the zeitgeist. Seriously, though, wearing a cloth face covering (a term that freely admits that these aren’t really doing all the jobs of masks!) does a number of things (I had to look into this a little, and this NPR article was helpful…): protects other people in case you’re already infectious but don’t know it blocks SOME droplet transmission from others (don’t to...

"With colour A, chain 166." There's so much despair in those words; so much hope. In case you’ve never crocheted, I’ll fill you in:  almost every blanket pattern starts the same way – by telling you to make a chain - a long, long, long chain, in this case, 166 stitches long. (Unless it's the kind of blanket where you make squares and stitch them together, in which case what you have isn't a blanket pattern but a square patterns.) You can't mess around with this chain, either, because it  will eventually be the width (or length) of your blanket.  So don't make those stitches too tight or you'll have a scrunched-up weeny blanket.  Or too loose, or you'll have a flopsy blanket with no structure. I never used to know anything about knitting or crocheting.  It’s possible, like most people I encounter, I assumed they were the same thing.  Now I know that there are many differences.  If you want to know if a person is knitting or crocheting (at the ve...

Do you have a few extra fridge magnets lying around the house?  Here's a fun way to upcycle them! One of the fun things about living in Israel is having a magnetic front door.  Most front doors are metal, unlike back in Canada, where they were made of wood.  And because everyone's front doors are metal, it's very common for businesses to advertise by leaving information stuck to your door with a "fridge" magnet. So far, we’ve been mostly throwing these out.  They're not powerful enough to hold up much, and I don't want them cluttering up our lives or getting us confused with the magnets we keep from the business we like and use (the guy who fixed our washing machine; the book store we like in Tel Aviv; the Chinese restaurant I went to in Beersheva). But now I have an upcycling solution that's very quick and easy and kills two birds with one stone:  what to do with all those magnets, and what to do with clean white paper that's printed on one sid...

Looking for a sukkah craft for slightly older kids that hasn't been done to death? I totally was, because we're making GZ's birthday party in the sukkah and I wanted to do some kind of simple craft that would appeal to the boys without being too fiddly. I eventually found this post about a Xmas craft, and decided that, writ slightly larger, these would make terrific sukkah decorations.  They have all the elements I love - namely, tinfoil, glue and Sharpies (!!!) PLUS they don't take much time for 8-year-old boys' attention span. And I think they look terrific - shiny and bright to light up any family's sukkah. Here’s what you'll need: - Cardboard circles - I used a bowl with a diameter of about 5.5" to cut these babies out.  The originals are much too tiny to see at night in a sukkah!  I used fairly thick cardboard from a box that held a six-pack of soda bottles. - Yarn - original post says fine yarn, but I blew this up accordingly to a medium-wei...

There’s a feeling when you’re crocheting and your yarn gets tangled.  Even if you don’t crochet, you’ve probably felt something like this.  A moment when everything mounts into impossibility and you want to scream and give up. I’m sure you’ve felt something like that. It’s a feeling of frustration.  You just want to stash the entire project.  It’s a feeling of disgust.  You never want to look at it again.  It’s a feeling of pointlessness.  Snipping the yarn would be both so easy and so wrong. But more than that, it’s a feeling that you’re all alone in the world. It’s your ball of yarn.  It’s your crochet project.  And it’s your snarl. Ultimately, nobody cares if you untangle it or not.  How depressing is that? If I stashed the project – no-one would know. If I threw it away – I doubt anyone would notice. If I snipped the yarn and carried on past the tangle – for sure, nobody but me would know about that. But it’s a tangle, and ...

Spoiler alert!  If you are on our “nearest and dearest” list, please don’t scroll down to peek at the craft project revealed below.  It is currently winging its way to you in the mail.  Be patient. (Um, if you feel you are near and dear and considerable time has passed and you have NOT received your very own Craft in the mail – well, oops.  We still love you, but are far from having our act together over here on this new side of the Atlantic.  Better luck to all of us next year.) So my nanny used to get these cards.  Maybe you’ve seen them.  They were all-occasion cards with paintings on the front.  Mediocre paintings of puppies and kittens and clowns and water and boats.  And the only thing that was special about the cards was that on the back, they said they were mouth-painted by people who had no limbs. Mouth-painted.  That phrase stuck with me, maybe because everybody always told me not to put paintbrushes in my mouth.  Or m...

… ‘til 16 years from now what really ought to be mailed today.  Isn’t that how the quote goes? Whoopsie. Seated on the floor Tisha b’Av morning, sifting through 30 years worth of papers (highly recommended for the occasion as both a saddening and deadening kind of occupation), I came across a small stack of thank-you cards from YM’s upsherin… ie, the upsherin we held when he turned three. Yes, the same YM who is turning 19 in a month and a half. I still really like the “logo” I designed for his upsherin – a blue scissors, open, with “YM” from top to bottom one way and the Hebrew letters yud and mem the other way.  I mock-airbrushed it with my set of “Blo-Pens” – a truly kitschy-but-cool craft supply if ever there was one.  I used cutting-edge scanning & colour-copying technology to apply the logo to everything from the invitations (in fridge magnet form!) to the program (yes, there was a program) to, well, the thank-you cards I don’t think anybody ever got. To b...

Despite a largely useless computer due to various hard drive failures (new one on its way), I wanted to do something special for this week’s parsha… except I like the hands-crossing Ephraim/Menashe activity so much, we’ll probably just do that again. But then I remembered – this is not only parshas Vayechi, but it is also the last parsha in sefer Bereishis – which is totally worth celebrating! This is a pop-up 3-d text project where the words Chazak, Chazak, v’Nischazek (חֲזַק חֲזַק וְנִתְחַזֵּק) can be coloured by the student, then jump out and make a delightful statement.  Geesh; I know I’m WAY overtired when I use the word “delightful.”  There’s also a song of Chazak, to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb (borrowed from Morah Morah Teach Me Torah – you can listen to the song here – search for “chazak” on the page).  It, too, is delightful. You can do this on a few different levels of complexity, depending on the age of your kids.  For the very youngest kids,...

My annual, non-comprehensive but hopefully fun and well-rounded, roundup of What There Is For You Online.  Enjoy! From Chinuch.org So!  With 40+ pages of Chanukah stuff on Chinuch.org, how do you know what’s good?  I have no idea, but here’s some of what appealed to me as I waded through those 40+ pages tonight (true confession:  I stopped after page 36):   Dreidel Tally Graphing Sheet Chanukah Matching Game (very simple memory game – I just wasted the last of my printer ink printing these ones out…) “My Menorah” Hebrew Song – cute and simple original song to the tune of LaKova Sheli  (but you have to know Hebrew) Simple preschool crafts: Six Interactive Chanukah Crafts A cute Chanukah Scavenger Hunt which would be good for a party, co-op, or anywhere you want a bunch of kids running around (not here, please!) Very sweet present-passing group game where kids sit in a circle, learn right from left, hear the Chanukah story AND get to keep their pr...

Chanukah presents for my sisters, as modelled by Ted (and yes, I’m Canadian, so 2 L’s really IS the correct spelling!): 1) Shark mitts for Sara.  These were going to be elephants, hence the grey, but then I remembered that she’s kind of sick of elephants.  Like if somebody figures out that you like orchids, say, or salt-and-pepper shakers, then they’re going to get you nothing but orchids or salt-and-pepper shakers for the rest of your life.  She’s probably not really sick of elephants, but I figured a new animal would be a nice change of scenery.  So… what else is grey?  After pondering sheep for a while and yawning tremendously at the idea of sheep mittens (cute, but blah), I realized that sharks were the very thing.  There was also a matching grey hat, but I don’t seem to have gotten a picture; it’s exactly the same as the one I made for Abigail in the picture below.  Oh, and I slipped a little elephant into one of the mitts – a quick project ( Per...

Based on a “ladder” idea for Vayeitzei that I saw in Mommzy’s Montessori-based booklet of parsha ideas for Bereishis, I came up with this craft concept very, VERY quickly to occupy my kids and a friend who happened to come over last Friday for a 6-hour playdate (it wasn’t as gruelling as it sounds – I promise!). I borrowed a picture of Yaakov sleeping from this PDF of parsha colouring pages at Aish.com (I didn’t bother printing the rest of the picture, just used a PDF-to-JPG program to strip out that page, then used a paint program to cut out Yaakov, then used Word to paste three Yaakovs on one page so all three would fit on a single piece of paper.  Okay, that sounds like a LOT of work when I type it all out like that.  Trust me – it took about 2 minutes or less. The kids all enjoyed building the ladders and cutting out stars from yellow construction paper.  Gavriel Zev drew an alien above Yaakov’s head – that’s what he’s dreaming about.  Naomi Rivka wanted to...

I don’t want to inundate this blog with crochet projects… but on the other hand, I really do feel that crocheting complements our homeschooling, because it makes me less fidgety and better able to sit with the children and IGNORE them while they’re doing their work.  It sure beats moving across the room to use the computer, which – as any classroom teacher can tell you – is a recipe for inattentive kids (“heck, if the teacher’s not paying attention, why should we?”). So while they work, I sit and crochet.  Today, while Naomi and I were doing school during GZ’s preschool class at a local recreation centre, I made these miniature turtles… here they are, frolicking in their bed of yarn. They took about 45 minutes each – would have been far less if I wasn’t actually helping Naomi with her work. Then, later on this evening, a few “finishing up” type projects I’ve been putting off… This hat was completely finished over the summer (June?) – and then I ran out of yarn just befor...