Inspiration for Hanukkah and a quick menorah tutorial

Sharon from the sweet Israeli blog Gonna Be 40 invited me to write a Hannukah post for the 8 days of miracles series she has on her blog.

Since the original post is all in Hebrew, I translated it for you, and here it is in English...

So we're still licking our wounds from the huge summer vacation (plus almost another month of holidays for Rosh Hashana, that we had here in Israel), and now Hanukkah is knocking on our door. If you celebrate Hanukkah, I guess you also find yourself hosting a lot these days. Almost every day we have guests over – our friends, friends of the kiddos, family, neighbors – and we light candles in our 342 Hanukkah Menorah's (the kids are making maybe 100 of them every year!!!) and eat latkes and Hanukkah doughnuts. So to help you have the most amazing Hanukkah party, here's a round-up of some great Hanukkah ideas.

Oh, and how can you have a Hanukkah without a DIY menorah?… Scroll down to see an easy tutorial for a natural menorah.

 

So any good party needs some nice decorations, right? On the blog Style at Home you can find a cute tutorial for dreidel garland. Anyone said Christmas?…

And if you want to involve the kids in all the preparations, you can have them make these great dreidel paper dolls from the blog Bringing Chesed Home.

If you want your Hanukkah to look a bit like Christmas, here's a beautiful Hanukkah tree!

The Etsy shop FrogPrincePaperie offers DIY Hanukkah printables. The set includes a banner, cupcake toppers, cupcake wraps, dreidel boxes, food labels and more.

The most important moment of any Hanukkah party is the lighting of the menorah, of course. From all the menoras I've seen online, this one, from Aunt Peaches, is my favorite! I'm definitely making one this year!

For the snacks you can make marshmallow dreidels…

And even Hanukkah gelts (these cute chocolate coins), like the ones on Oh Nuts.

And you will need something to hold these coins. How about these dreidel boxes from Martha Stewart?

If you need more ideas, take a look at my Hanukkah Pinterest board.

Now, like I promised, a menorah tutorial.

The whole idea about this menorah is to look around you and use stuff that you can find in your surrounding. You can also follow my steps below, but feel free to go wild!

Search for a nice, straight branch. If it has a section taller than the other, it's even better, this is where your Shamash will go.

You can leave your menorah natural or paint it. My son wanted a colorful one, so we painted… You can use spray paint or acrylics.

Just like that -

Now find a pine cone, try to find one with scales open. Again, you can choose if to paint or leave it that way. If you decided to paint, you can paint now or after you disintegrate the scales (I'm lazy, so I painted before disintegrating it…).

Disintegrate the scales.

Assembly time. Use hot glue gun to glue 3 scales at a time in a flowery shape. Make 8 of these plus one Shamash.

In the center of each flower, glue a small, simple, candle holder.

That's it, your menorah is ready!

Happy Holidays!

Now It's Your Turn! The Crafeteria's Weekly Pinterest Party

Yay! It's Wednesday again, time for our Pinterest Group Board Party! Let's see what you've been up to lately!

Remember? You pin your pictures to the Pinterest Group Board, get views from hundreds of followers and maybe even get to be featured here next week.

How to pin your photos to the group board?

1. Follow me on Pinterest
2. Leave a comment, here or on any of my Pinterest pins, with your Pinterest user name.
3. I'll follow you back
4. I'll send you an invite
5. Accept the invite
6. Start pinning!

Begginers, here's a detailed explanation:
- You have to follow me on Pinterest (and I have to follow you), because these are Pinterest's rules for group boards. If the board admin wants to invite people to the pin to the board, they have to follow each other. You can only follow one of my boards, btw.
- You don't have to be bloggers. As long as your pictures are somewhere around the WWW, you're good. Flickr, Picasaweb, Instagram etc. are all fine.
- Your pin doesn't have to be a tutorial. As long as it can be an inspiration to someone, that's fine.
- If you have a non-English blog, that's OK. These days, with Google Translate, we can just translate the page to another language.



All right then, shall we see today's features?

Michelle from The Paper Vine (remember? She guest posted here only a few days ago) created a cool and cute tutorial for a DIY photobooth, including printable photo props. If my girl was just a bit older, we could have had a great photobooth party for her friends!

Sharon from the cute blog Gonna Be 40 made a house-pillow that I'd love to place on ALL of our beds...

And Zehavit from the blog Mum Loves to Create, that I follow for 3 years or so (since I was in my scrap period), created this beautifull and delicate tag.

Thanks for sharing ladies, if you were featured, feel free to grab a button!

<a href="http://english.the-crafeteria.com/"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMbZd8bBPw_-htQxQXged3zu12v7ZFYjAJ2upIerNkXpGC12C3ver0lx8wDr0uI_nS1qLQxIxtnsEQFrhUA4HeJIwaQKCkuhUXinNKTXy5KUKpfqZVKzM93v34zosGQdQt4ZnRzEQqEdrB/s307/feature%2520button%2520new1.jpg" /></a>

That's it for today, don't forget to pin your best works into the board!