Decking the Halls for Hanukkah (DIY Style)

The family is coming to our house for Hanukkah this year so I wanted to do a little decorating and thanks to Pinterest, I found a couple of Hanukkah craft projects to make our home festive! For the dinning room table, I made Tissue Kissing Balls from The Idea Room. The idea seemed pretty simple. Using a roll of streamers, cut them into 24 inch strips, crumple, fold the top 1/3 of the way down and roll the paper up so it takes the shape of a rose bud. Then hot glue to styrofoam balls (I used 3 inch styrofoam balls). You could obviously do this in a variety of colors but I stuck with the traditional white and blue for Hanukkah and am really happy with the result!

Next project was some DIY Hanukkah garland made from felt. This idea comes from Creative Jewish Mom. I used dreidel and star shaped cookie cutters to trace the shapes onto felt. Cut them out and hot-glued them to piece of ric-rac ribbon. Simple!

Then I decided to go one step further. I was going to attempt to trace letters onto felt to spell out "Happy Hanukkah"...... then the most awesome gift showed up at my front door (thanks mom!). I am now the proud owner of a Cricut! The Cricut is a personal cutting machine that can cut shapes and letters out of fabric and paper. Although cutting felt on the Cricut was a little tricky. I used stiff felt but the blade isn't able to cut through the entire piece, so I had to use scissors to finish cutting them out. I hot-glued the letters to a rectangular piece of stiff white felt, put a hole punch in the upper corners of each rectangle and strung it on the rest of my ric-rac. Voilà!