February 16, 2012 – 10:32
For my job-hunting boyfriend. Find a six-inch square shadow box. Good luck with that; I made this one. Make sure it’s deep enough to hold a shot glass. Drill holes in the back to take the wires which will hold the contents and a hanging loop of some sort. Paint it fire-alarm red and varnish [...]
February 14, 2012 – 20:55
The boyfriend works on glioblastoma. Which is a cancer that happens to astrocytes, so he says. giantmicrobes.com has neurons, but not astrocytes, so I made a plush astrocyte. With a wire skeleton so that all its tentacles are posable, because who wants a non-posable astrocyte, really? It’s purple because all the pictures of glioblastoma are [...]
February 13, 2012 – 21:33
Everyone has a challah cover that says “Shabbat v’Yom Tov,” don’t they? It’s a compulsory wedding gift, I believe. But not many people have one like this. Bwahahaa, geekery. I might post a pattern at some point, if anyone wants it.
Following a visit home, during which old toyboxes were opened and photographs taken, here’s a window into my childhood. I spent uncountable hours making this kind of stuff–not only accessories, but a whole village of wonderful houses, none of which have survived the years. When you’ve seen all this, you should realise that the question [...]
September 4, 2011 – 15:13
The original Tefillin Barbie was a 2006 model with a long denim skirt.* She’s getting increasingly difficult to find, but people are still buying Tefillin Barbies. So I’ve bought a dozen Computer Engineer Barbies to play with instead. Computer Engineer Barbie wears leggings, which is a bit of a change from the frummie skirt. Still, [...]
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 The hardest part was getting the braid around the outside right. I wanted it to be just one line, going round and round, but if you just run a sinewave around the edge, you get either two or four lines, and I very much wanted only one line, because [...]
Part 1, Part 2 One of the clever things about piyutim is all the little linguistic tricks they use. Rhyme, of course; I tried to use white space between stanzas to show the rhyming structure, but I think I didn’t use quite enough of it. So, there’s rhyme. Then there’s alphabetical acrostic, which I’ve indicated [...]
I like a bit of a challenge now and again. Here’s a community that wants to honour its rabbi by giving him a piece of artwork. Since the rabbi is well-beloved by the families with children, the Surprise Committee wanted to have the children participate in creating the artwork. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually result in [...]
Here’s a video featuring a very tiny totally kosher Torah scroll. The video’s more concerned with the accoutrements, a little aron kodesh and the usual silver ornaments for a Torah scroll, than with the scroll itself. They’re made by Bezalel School-trained artist Shuki Freiman, and they are breathtakingly beautiful, utterly and completely. Seeing them is [...]
I like challenges. This challenge was to cook up illuminations for a Megillah being given as a bar mitzvah present. Bar mitzvahs are tricky – you want something appealing to a 13-year old, but it also needs to be something they won’t hate in twenty years’ time. The family sent me pictures of things – [...]
