November 2015
What's New from Lee & Pearl:
We hope all our friends had a thrilling Halloween, a restful Veteran's Day, and are looking forward to a warm and wonderful Thanksgiving and holiday season to come!
Cooler weather has finally arrived here in the Los Angeles workroom. To celebrate, we've pulled out a collection of seasonal fashions, winter sports outfits and holiday clothes and accessories, all made using Lee & Pearl patterns (and stretch mesh and stretch velvet fabric kits), available in our Etsy store.
We even have a pattern made specifically for this time of year — #1022: Cookie Time Apron, Pinafore and Oven Mitt for 18" Dolls.
Use this confection of a pattern to make a bibbed-and-banded apron, a pinafore with full skirt and graceful shoulder ruffles, and an easy — and adorable — doll-sized oven mitt. You can use novelty holiday fabrics for your modern girls, or calico, plaid, or plain white for a more vintage feel.
When we made the Oven Mitt pattern last year, we were so taken with the nifty technique for creating the lining and decorative binding with one seam and no tricky turning that we used that same technique to make an adorable Holiday Stocking, which we offered as a FREE gift on our website.
Because we can't get enough of the holidays, we also offered a set of FREE printable vintage Christmas cards, envelopes and stamps!
And later on in this newsletter, you'll see our latest holiday treat — a make-your-own Chanukah Menorah (or Chanukiya) video tutorial and FREE printable template.
We've offered so many FREE downloads in the last two years that even we can't immediately remember what's available, or where it was first offered. To make these goodies easier for our friends to find, we've collected all the download links and reference links — including the Christmas cards and Holiday Stocking pattern — on ONE PAGE of our website:
Visit the FREE Stuff from Lee & Pearl page!
Be sure to bookmark this page, and check back often to see what we've added.
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel:
Thanks to our brother Dan, we finally have an easy and portable light set-up in the workroom and can create all the nicely lit tutorial and review videos we like with the flick of a switch!
Just in the last two weeks we've put out a review of our visit to Japanese dollar store Daiso, an atmospheric introduction to Halloween on Lee Street in Old Town Alexandria, VA — the home of our East coast workroom, where "Lee" handed out candy to over 3,000 trick-or-treaters — a review of some of the new Target® Our Generation® accessory kits and Hallmark® Christmas ornaments scaled for 18" dolls, and our latest — a beautiful, simple tutorial for turning the barely-painted plastic "coals" in the Our Generation® grill into, well — THIS:
Please enjoy these videos. And if there are subjects or techniques you'd like to see us review or demonstrate in the future, LET US KNOW. We take requests!
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL HERE
Tutorial/Printable: Make your own Chanukah Menorah (Chanukiya)
The time approaches when Jewish people around the world celebrate Chanukah — the Festival of Lights, an eight-night commemoration of an uprising, over two thousand years ago, against a conqueror who tried to outlaw the very practice of Judaism itself.
When the lamp in the restored Temple in Jerusalem burned for eight full days and nights on the single flask of kosher oil left in the city, the victorious Maccabees knew that a miracle had occurred.
This year, to celebrate that miracle with our American Girl® Rebecca Rubin®, who shares both our New York and Eastern European Jewish heritage, we decided to make her a traditional Chanukah Menorah (or Chanukiya) of her own. We scoured the web for examples of the kind of vessel a family who traveled from Eastern Europe to America around the turn of the century could have brought with them.
On eBay, we found this beautiful piece:
This is a silver-plated stamped brass Chanukah Menorah, made in Warsaw around 1900. We love the simple but elegant shape of this lamp and the beautifully detailed iconography: the Lions of Judah around the Tablets of Law — the Ten Commandments — in the middle, with the Crown of David on top, a lotus blossom on the bottom, and period-appropriate curving foliage on the sides.
As an added bonus, this seems to have been a popular piece. We found another beautiful version of this same Menorah listed by a different eBay seller.
The first attempts we made to create a doll scale version of this Menorah were NOT successful. You need a super steady hand and remarkable sculpting talent to produce tiny iconography out of hot glue squiggles or poly clay. We didn't manage it.
Yikes.
But then "Lee" remembered a home decor tutorial she'd seen on Susan Myers' craft blog for creating beautiful textured metal tiles from knitting needle-embossed dollar store cookie sheets. We both thought this technique showed tremendous potential for doll craft applications. And as you can see, it worked for our Chanukah Menorah project more beautifully than we could have imagined.
Though you can create your own shape and patterns and still use the techniques in our video, we have provided the template we used as a FREE printable download.
CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW OUR YOUTUBE TUTORIAL AND MAKE YOUR OWN CHANUKAH MENORAH OR CHANUKIYA
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD OUR FREE CIRCA 1900 CHANUKAH MENORAH TEMPLATE
We hope that you give this craft a try. The basic supplies are both inexpensive and easily available, and the technique is genuinely fun.
Here are the supplies you will need:
First off, you'll need a dollar store baking sheet (or flimsy aluminum tray) with a flat section at least 5" square. You'll also need stiff cardboard (we used the back of a legal pad), a scrap of cardstock (we used a manila folder) and 14 beads to use as both candleholders and feet (we used cheap plastic pony beads from the craft store, 1/4" high x 5/16" wide).
And yes, we used birthday candles for the candles — though don't ever light them: this is a mostly cardboard craft.
Here are the tools you'll need:
The towel, hot glue gun, scissors, pencil or other marking tool, metal knitting needle and paint brush with a rounded end are essential. The other tools — sanding paper to scuff the aluminum surface for painting, toothpick and popsicle stick for applying glue, eyelash brush for cleaning up hot glue strings, nail file for removing mold marks from the cheap plastic beads, craft knife and vegetable peeler for trimming the birthday candles to doll size, are optional but recommended.
For painting, we used two of our favorite tools: a medium sized flat brush and small rectangles cut from a microfiber rag.
You're also going to need a selection of adhesives, plus an optional filler:
In the video, we use all of these materials: tape and ordinary office glue stick to hold the paper templates in place, Aleene's Tacky Glue to bond the metal and cardboard to the cardstock back, hot glue to attach the beads, and E6000 to put everything together at the end. But if you need to work indoors and are worried about the solvents in E6000, omit it and use the Aleene's instead.
That unfamiliar jar in the middle — the Golden Artist Colors Self Leveling Clear Gel, which is available at Michael's, other art supply stores and on the web — works wonderfully to fill in and make permament the raised areas on your Menorah. But it's a bit costly. If you have a coupon and plan to use this technique for other projects in the future, definitely get a jar. If not, go ahead and skip this step. As you can see below, the Chanukiya looks almost as good without the gel filler (on the left) as it does with it (on the right).
When it came time to paint, we tried a selection of different primers at the start, and our favorite ordinary acrylic sealer at the end:
Painting on a shiny aluminum surface can be tricky, but we found that all of these primers worked well. However, all of them — except the brush-on gesso — must be used outside, in a well-ventilated area, and/or while wearing a properly-rated mask.
We're serious about this. Always read the labels when working with craft paints and glues and pay attention to any warnings. You do not want to be inhaling organic solvents or spray-paint particulates.
And now let's talk about these beautiful metallic finishes and colors...
We highly recommend Jacquard Lumière acrylic paints, which come in a wide array of beautiful metallic, pearl, halo and jewel-tone colors and can be purchased as both individual pots and "Exciter Packs" of coordinating colors. We love to layer these thin paints, creating realistic looks with medium, light and dark tones mingled together, brushed onto specific areas, or applied as an all-over finish and then wiped off with a faintly damp rag to reveal layers underneath.
As an added bonus if you are considering splurging on a set, these paints can also be used on fabric and leather!
For this project, we also experimented with a number of Inka Gold metallic rubs, which are water-soluble wax finishes that can be applied over the Lumière paints and buffed to an ultra-realistic metallic shine.
In the video tutorial, we show the complete process of painting this "silver-plate-and-black-tarnish" Menorah:
We love the other finishes we tried as well. Here are the details of each, in case one strikes your fancy for this, or any other project:
Lindsey's "antique enamel" Menorah was painted over a white gesso primer base. We started with a solid coat of Lumière Pearl White. Next, we applied a light coat of Lumière Pearl Turquoise, and immediately rubbed it off the high points and edges with a faintly damp cloth. Finally, we added a highlight by dry brushing the high points with Lumière Metallic Brass.
We started work on Jack's brass beauty with an olive drab auto primer. Next, we applied a solid coat of Lumière Old Brass. Then we applied a light coat of Lumière Metallic Olive, and immediately rubbed it off the high points and edges with a faintly damp cloth. Finally, we added a highlight by dry brushing the high points with Lumière Metallic Brass.
Finally, Rebecca's pinky gold version started with a white spray primer. We then applied light finishes of Lumière Brass, Metallic Bronze and a few dabs of Metallic Rust. After the paints had dried, we buffed a coat of Inka Gold Old Silver to a high shine, and as a final touch, picked out a few highlights with Lumière Halo Pink Gold.
Once you are happy with your Lumière or Inka Gold finish, apply a sealer to make it all permament!
See you next month...!
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