Oh Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah, Come Light the Menorah...

Hanukkah begins tonight at sundown, so that means 8 fun nights of celebrating at our house.  In honor of the holiday, I wrote a post for the Creating Keepsakes blog today.  I'll also share my projects here.  

Hanukkah is filled with many wonderful traditions:  lighting the candles, playing dreidel, eating latkes, and opening presents.  This means that there are a lot of photo opportunities.  Check out these Hanukkah Photo Tips to make the most of these opportunities.

Taking pictures of the menorah indoors at night can be somewhat tricky.  I often end up with some “clunkers” – photos with poor lighting, distracting backgrounds, or unattractive shadows on people’s faces.  Sometimes photo editing software can provide the perfect fix.  For example, I had a photo of my daughter gazing at the menorah, but the photo had a harsh yellow cast and unflattering shadows.  My solution was to use a selective color technique.  Using Photoshop Elements, I converted the photo to black and white and then colorized only the menorah.  Problem solved!   I used the color-selected photo on this layout:

As seen in the Scrapbooking Holidays and Celebrations 2011 special issue. Copyright Creative Crafts Group.  Posted with prior permission from the publisher.

Although there are many Christmas scrapbooking papers and embellishments on the market, there aren’t as many Hanukkah and Jewish scrapbooking products.  This year I challenged myself to create a Hanukkah card with paper from a Christmas collection.  I used papers from Prima’s North Country line (Christmas/winter themed) to create this Hanukkah card:

I couldn’t find any large Star of David scrapbook embellishments, so I made my own.  I traced stars (printed from the internet) onto chipboard, cut them out, then covered them with silver glitter glue (Ranger’s Stickles).

Happy Hanukkah and Happy Holidays everyone!