CRAFTASTIC: Easy & Fun Hanukkah Crafts

With just a week until the Festival of Lights begins, I wanted to share a few simple Hanukkah craft projects.

The first one comes from Once Upon a Holiday at Alpha Mom and it's a great way to get your children involved in "lighting" the Menorah without any potential for fire-related accidents.

With this fun piece of wall art, instead of lighting a candle every night, your child can glue a pom pom on, representing the flame.  Great idea, right?  Here's how to do it.

Carefully paint your little one's hand with finger paint and press a print onto a piece of construction paper.  Their fingers will represent the candles.

Do the same with the second hand, making sure the thumbs overlap so there are only 9 "candles" not 10.  The thumbs in the middle will symbolize the "shamash" or the worker candle that lights the other candles during Hanukkah.

After your hand prints are in place, decorate your Menorah by drawing designs onto the paper or with stickers.  They used triangles to form Jewish stars in the example:

To "light" the Menorah every night, glue on a pom pom to represent the flame like they did here:

Some other ways to do it would be to draw a flame in or as they suggest on Alpha Mom, get out some yellow paint and use your child's thumbprint for the flame which I think would be really cute.  For the complete instructions, visit Once Upon a Holiday.

Here's another great DIY Menorah project from Parents.com.

All you need are nine wooden spools (available at most craft stores), some blue paint, number stickers, nine pencils and nine yellow erasers.

Paint each spool blue and add number stickers from 1-9 to each one (the 9 should go on the tallest spool).

Insert one pencil into each spool to represent the candles....

And each night add an eraser as a flame.  Easy peasy!

The last Hanukkah craft I have to share comes from the fabulous ladies over at Prudent Baby.

This fleece pom pom garland can be made for lots of occasions but I love the idea of putting it up for Hanukkah.  And it's fairly simple to do.

Cut pieces of blue and white felt into strips.

Then make small cuts into each side of the fleece leaving about a centimeter in the middle uncut.  When you're done with that, roll each length up.

Thread some embroidery floss through a needle and run it through the center of your pom pom:

Then wrap it around several times and tie off, leaving enough on the ends to tie to your garland.

Repeat until you have enough pom poms to decorate your space.  Want more details?  Visit Prudent Baby for the full how to.

I hope these crafts gave gotten your creative juices flowing.  If you do make any of them, please send in some pictures so we can feature your handiwork here on AFOMT!


Images: Parents.com, Prudent Baby & Once Upon a Holiday