Month: October 2008

Lowe’s has a little magazine called “Creative Ideas” that they mail out a few times each year – it can be subscribed to here. Inside one of the latest issues was this project for wall art:

I thought that with the wooden pieces at the top and bottom that it looked like the rollers, or handles, on a Torah scroll (the Torah is the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy – you can see one here), and I thought it would be a great craft for Simchat Torah (“sim-kaht tore-uh”). That’s the holiday that celebrates the end of the annual reading cycle. For instance, since the congregation begins at Genesis and ends at Deuteronomy each year, when you get to the end and start over, you celebrate! This is what Simchat Torah is all about…plus dancing, drinking, celebrating…

Anyway, Simchat Torah is a huge holiday for children. I guess the most common craft is to make flags for them to hold and wave. I try to decorate our home for just about every big holiday so this year Leslie and I got together and rather than make flags, we made a banner like the one in the Lowe’s magazine.

—And the thing about this craft, like just about all the others I’ve made for Jewish holidays, translate so well to other traditions…like I could totally see someone doing dowels in pastel colors and decoupaging on a bunch of vintage bunny images for a ‘Happy Easter’ banner…or doing the same thing with deeper colors and Autumn leaves for a Fall banner…or, well, you know. There are a zillion possibilities with this.—

Supplies:
* Wooden curtain rod, sawed in half (so you can use a short one for hanging this on the front door or a longer rod for hanging elsewhere in your home on the wall)
* Four curtain finials
* Wood stain, plus varnish if you like
* Foam brush for applying wood stain plus protective gloves
* Acrylic paint plus brushes
* Stencil letters and stencil brush if you want to do lettering that way
* Either butcher paper, drop cloth, or something else strong to paint on
* Glue gun, glue to attach the painted piece to the rods
* Yarn, string, or jute to tie to the ends of the top rod for hanging

Av and I went to the home improvement shop and bought one curtain rod (when sawed in half, it made the two we needed plus it was the right width for hanging on the front door) plus four finials. He sawed the curtain rod, screwed on the finials, and stained everything.

Leslie and I got out a bunch of acrylic paints and brushes and decided to use butcher paper to paint on. Cut the butcher paper longer than you expect you want the banner to hang because you will want to wrap the top and bottom of the paper around the dowels a couple of times so it’s strong:

Leslie painted the top half and I painted the bottom part. We just tried to go with something abstract, and the nice thing about it is that if you look at it like this, it looks like the sky and the earth and the opposite way it looks like the earth and the sea. In an abstract way, I mean…:

I used my stencils and some gold paint to spell out “Simchat Torah”:

After everything dried, the paper was turned over, centered on the dowels, and hot glued around them a couple of times:

I’m planning on using some strong yarn and hanging the banner that way (like in the magazine pic) but just for this pic I cheated and used the hook on my wreath hanger!

On October 4th, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore opened their 50-artist exhibit, “The Marriage of Art, Science, & Philosophy” which includes 18 scrolls of the drawings of Tuscaloosa’s Frank Calloway. He lives at the Bryce campus and is 112 years old.

His drawings are done on butcher paper with crayon, pen, and magic marker.

This is from the AP story:

His caretakers have suspended sales of his artwork until after the show after finding out that some of his drawings could sell for thousands of dollars.

…

Calloway views art as his job and sits at a table by a window drawing for seven to nine hours a day, usually wearing blue denim overalls and a crisp dress shirt, said Nedra Moncrief-Craig, director of Alice M. Kidd Nursing Facility, a state home where Calloway lives.

“He draws all day long except for the time that he spends in activity and eating his meals,” Moncrief-Craig said. “That’s what he loves to do.”

Exhibition Curator Rebecca Hoffberger said of Frank Calloway:

Frank is an astronaut who has navigated 112 trips around our Sun, survived untold hardships, injustices, and loss, and yet never fails to radiate kindness to all and a personal and constant engagement with wonder. His instinctive love of numbers, the patterns they make, and the way his meandering calculations balance to form the great masses of numbers that fill his large notebooks make this phenomenon of nature a real star in our national museum’s communal exploration of what Art, Science & Philosophy mean to each of us.

There are 10 pics from the exhibit here on Flickr

I was thinking of other crafts to make for the sukkah, and came up with the idea to use a clothespin and scrapbook paper to make dragonflies. I think these turned out really great, and besides a sukkah craft, these would be great in the summertime hanging on the porch like a mobile.

Supplies:
clothespins
folk art acrylic paint for clothespins, brush
scrapbook paper – if there’s a chance these might get wet, laminate the paper
glue – Elmer’s or Sobo
scissors
clear line for hanging
optional: glitter, seed beads for embellishing the dragonfly clothespin

Directions:
Paint one clothespin for every dragonfly. If you like, you can glitter or glue tiny seed beads on too — or just leave it natural:

I used two different scrapbook paper designs for each butterfly:

Folded the paper in half lengthwise and cut them together (so both sides cut exactly the same) – here is one sheet by itself – since each dragonfly has two sets of wings, I made one wing set shorter and one longer:

Take the two short sets of wings and glue them back to back – so there is contrast if the dragonfly is spinning and you can see the top and bottom. Do the same for the long set of wings:

Put a dab of glue on these two spots inside the clothespin:

Center the wings inside the clothespin and let dry:

Use clear string to tie them for hanging:

The Halloween paper banner is done!

I don’t know why I’m so into paper banners / garlands this year – maybe it’s because there’s so much beautiful scrapbook paper out there…

Materials:
Paper in four different patterns:
one for big main triangles (eight sheets if you do it the way I did)
one for inside main triangle (eight sheets ” ” ” ” ” ” ” “)
one for circles behind Halloween letters
one for printing Halloween letters on
Scissors
Mod Podge, black foam rubber brush
Some kind of paper punch for running ribbon through
Ribbon
Stapler
Glue – Elmer’s or Sobo is fine
Stencil and paint or download my letters with your printer
Optional: paper punches for letters and letter backgrounds

Directions:
Cut the paper you’re using for the eight main triangles into a triangle shape:

I found this sort-of ornate looking paper to cut my secondary triangles out of, and cut that paper into eight smaller triangles to fit onto the large triangle. I was just going for a Halloween look:

Used Mod-Podge to get that on:

This is a new paper punch that I picked up to make slits into paper so it’s easy to run the ribbon through – this one came from Hobby Lobby:

Close to each edge, make the slits with the paper punch (of course, you can just do this with a pair of scissors too):

Run the ribbon through – I like to use much, much more ribbon that I know I’ll need to use then cut off the excess. I ran the ribbon through all eight triangles:

Now it’s time to make letters! Just use a font/size that will be perfect for your punch size. In this case, I was using a 2-5/16″ round punch:

With a slightly bigger punch, I punched out nine scalloped circles to go behind the Halloween letters. The main reason I did this, though, was because I needed a secure way to get my “Halloween” letters onto the garland:

…then before and after each triangle, I stapled the scalloped circles onto the garland:

…then I used regular Sobo glue (Elmer’s is perfect too) and glued each letter of Halloween onto those scalloped circles. This covers up the staple. You don’t need to use much glue at all, and it dries super-quick so you can just go from one letter to the next without having to hold them:

And here it is, all done!

Tonight, the Houston Chronicle posted an article about Cleveland Turner, the Flower Man of Houston’s Third Ward, and how his house was damaged during Hurricane Ike and will be cleaned up by a group of volunteers this weekend.

A portion of the article reads:

Once a homeless man who spent 17 years on the streets, Turner said his art was inspired by a vision he experienced while being treated for alcoholism at a local hospital.

“I was lying on the bedside,” he once explained, “and this big, beautiful thing came up from the ground. It was shaped round, and it had flowers poking up on the sides, and it went up, up in tiers. It changed my whole life.”

There are several pics of Mr. Turner and his house on Flickr here, and a film crew came out and did a short piece on him:

On the house, there is a sign:

The Flower Man
Cleveland Turner, affectionately called the Flower Man, turned the yard of his Third Ward home into a magical garden with elevated beds that flower year-round, a penthouse for observation, a shade porch, and carpeted walkways.

As a boy in Mississippi, he had loved flowers and wanted to live surrounded by them. As a young man, he settled in Houston and found himself sorely tempted by the bars on every street corner. While recovering from alcohol poisoning nearly 20 years ago, he made a pact with G-d. To find the strength to stay sober, he would create the house of flowers. The work of art he created has sustained him through difficult times and has established him as one of the most important artists of the Third Ward.