From November, 2018 till the beginning of 2024, I did the weekly newsletter for Golf Manor Synagogue (“GMS”). The design took its cues from the existing newsletter, as well as the typography in its long-standing logo. I added a simple drawing of the stained-glass ner tamid from the synagogue’s main sanctuary as a structural element. Here are an image of the Bulletin’s previous design and three examples of the redesigned newsletter.
Every other year or so, my wife and I make Purim costumes for our children. My wife machine sews much better than I do, but I’m the intrepid (foolhardy?) hacker who isn’t afraid to cobble something together without a pattern. Here are some of my designs, modeled by my children. I’ve masked out their faces, to protect the innocent. You can click on any image to enlarge it.
Lip Gloss Lipstick
One of my daughters once asked me to dress her up as lip gloss. Clueless guy that I was, I figured that was another name for lipstick. (She meant the stuff that’s long and thin, like a pencil.) I don’t know if it’s apparent from the photo, but the black “tube” has little shiny dots all over it, and the fabric I used for the tip of the “lipstick” has silver “gemstones” all over it.
Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments
That same year (was it something in the water?), my son decided to dress up as Mount Sinai. That was a much simpler costume to design, and the furry “grass” fabric proved to be a great investment – you’ll see more of it a few costumes down.
Bag of Groceries, front and back
The next year, our oldest daughter wanted to be a bag of groceries. Time to buy batting! One or another of our kids wore this costume at least three different years.
Two Fish and a Fisherman
A few years later, my wife picked up a two-piece vinyl rain outfit at the thrift shop. The younger children were all doing their own things, but the two of the older kids decided to join me as a fisherman and his catch. If the fish on the pole look familiar, it’s because I featured them on an earlier post. Helpful hint: Use a low-temp glue gun for styrofoam eyes, not high-temp.
[4/7 of] A Set of Pencils
Two Monsters and Rainbow Dash, front and back
Horned Monster, with real bird skull necklace
Another year, the kids wanted new costumes, but I knew I wouldn’t have time for anything intricate. I told them I’d make each of them a long, sleeveless hoodie (a closed-up tube, essentially) out of whatever fabric they wanted, and that we’d work together to customize and accessorize. (Recognize the green fabric?) Almost all of the kids ended up as monsters, with different tails, horns, ears, wings, and glue-gunned appliqués. One decided to dress up as Rainbow Dash.
Esrog boxes are a woodworking project I’ve turned to a few times over the years. They take a whole summer to make, and, unlike other projects like bread boards and lamps, it doesn’t matter if a camper’s older sibling has already made one – as soon as a boy is old enough, he can use one of his own. Wooden boxes must, by necessity, be larger than the fancy silver ones, because a thin sheet of metal is much stronger and resilient than an equivalent thickness of wood – and the internal volume of the box must be large enough to hold a decent-sized esrog. That makes designing a modestly-sized wooden esrog box a challenge.
My first design for an esrog box dates back to the mid-nineties, when I worked at Camp Shivte Yisrael, in the Catskills. If anything, it was too easy for campers to cut out, and it was a little tricky to assemble without clamping. It was also really big. (I sometimes call it my “esrog trunk.”) However, it was easy to inscribe and decorate, and it would be very easy to mass-produce. The corners are standard cove molding. (The ornamentation was done before varnishing, using oil color pencils from Walnut Hollow Farm.)
Esrog Box 2 was designed for Camp Ashreinu, a day camp. The first prototype had a horizontal, clamshell design, with a braided leather carrying strap and a solid brass pitam. IIRC, it looked like it might be a little tricky for the campers to pull off, and the hinged lids wobbled a bit. I redesigned it with a vertical alignment. The lid lifts right off; when on, it’s held in place by two rare-earth magnets. (I love using rare-earth magnets in craft projects!)
Esrog Box 3 was also designed for Camp Ashreinu. It cuts a much smaller profile, similar to that of the cardboard boxes esrogim ship in. (If I were to do it again, I’d make it half an inch longer.) Each layer was made from a precut blank – the boys hollowed out the insides. A lip, glued to the lid, allows the lid to fit snugly into the sides of the box, and rare-earth magnets keep the lid from popping off. This time, I came up with a new twist: Instead of printing the usual paper patterns, which have to be pinned onto the wood in just the right position and traced with carbon paper, I designed 3D-printed plastic stencils, which snapped onto the wood blanks.
Inside our new sukkah. (Click to enlarge.)
A quick primer: Two weeks after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, comes the festival of Sukkos (the Biblical festival of Tabernacles; some pronounce it “Sukkot” – Wikipedia link). It’s a week-long holiday on which observant Jews eat, sleep, and generally spend time in sukkahs (Wikipedia link), little huts with roofs made of plant material. Our cousin Robert Avrech recently posted a collection of photos of sukkahs new and old, from different parts of the world.
About ten years ago, our family spent its first Sukkos at home. That meant either buying a prefab sukkah or building one from scratch. The problem was that we had nowhere to put it when it wasn’t being used. Our garage is small, and we don’t own a shed. Many prefab models, and most DIY sukkahs, are made of between seven and nine framed panels, each measuring four feet wide, seven or eight feet tall, and from one to over three inches thick! There are other options, generally consisting of fabric stretched over wood or metal frames; they take up very little space after they’re disassembled, but (a) many of them have walls which sway in the wind, which may or may not be “up to code” for a sukkah, and (b) I’d like to avoid using metal, since there’s more than one rabbinic authority who requires that the roof not be supported, even indirectly, with metal. (It turns out that this last consideration may be more complicated than that, but I only recently found that out.) There was also the question of how much we could afford to spend.
I ended up designing a sukkah with a notched wooden frame and walls made of white Sequentia (fiberglass-reinforced plastic). Everything was held together with vinyl cable ties. It was a really nice sukkah to look at and sit in, the materials were fairly rainproof, it was very compact when disassembled, and (on paper, at least) it looked to be pretty sturdy. But it was only stable once it was completely assembled, so it was a dog to put up and take down – the first time we erected it, it took no less than six people to hold the parts in place while I ran around, fastening the pieces together!
Last year that sukkah blew down in a storm. It had withstood much worse, but I guess some of the wood had weakened with age and exposure. I’d been daydreaming about a redesign for a while, and now opportunity was knocking.
The new sukkah is made of decking lumber, corrugated plastic boards, and expanded PVC. (See list of materials below.) I could have used HDPE, the material plastic cutting boards are made of, but it’s twice as heavy and twice the price. The biggest improvements over “Sukkah 1.0” are that the corner posts are free-standing and self-supporting, and the panels are stiff enough that they don’t flop over before I have a chance to secure them in place. Not counting the time it takes to drag all of the pieces out of the garage, around the house, and onto the front yard, I think I could have this sukkah completely assembled in less than fifteen minutes!
One downside of the new sukkah is that the corner posts aren’t made of plant-based material. I didn’t have time to both fabricate them from plywood and weatherproof them.
Here’s a photo of two corner posts, cut from expanded PVC board. One is disassembled and the other is complete and standing. Each completed corner post weighs about 32 pounds. Designing these was the hardest part of the project. My oldest child reminds me that, at one point, I had to put aside my pencil and the Legos and take a nap!
(Click to enlarge.)
It would have taken me forever to cut these out with a jigsaw, but Hive13, a local hackerspace, let me bring down the materials to be cut on their CNC router (explanation here). They were also nice enough to show the kids and me around. What a cool place. (Thanks, Coy!)
Each of the sukkah’s sides has crossbeams and a track, which run through holes in the corner posts. Notches in these cross-members allow them to drop onto (or fit under) the corner posts; the notches also keep the cross-members from sliding out, and they make it easy to space the corner posts correctly. Two crossbeams run along the inside of each wall, and one runs on the outside. In the picture below, the tracks and inner crossbeams are in place.
(Click to enlarge)
The crossbeams are made of 6″ wood decking planks (pressure-treated), ripped in half lengthwise. The tracks are made of composite decking planks, also ripped lengthwise; the planks come pre-grooved on their undersides, which saves me the trouble of having to cut grooves myself.
After the panels and the outer crossbeams are up, here’s what the sukkah looks like:
(Click to enlarge)
Note the cable ties in the panels, and the ends of the roof supports sticking out. More on those later.
The side of the sukkah with the entrance has only one plastic panel. There’s a curtain hung across the doorway, which we can tie up to one side if we want fresh air. I cut holes into a piece of wood to accommodate the crossbeams:
(Click to enlarge.)
The top beam passes through, while the lower two are notched. (The holes are offset to accommodate this.) I could have used expanded PVC for this part, too, but I didn’t have any more. The lower crossbeam is made of a reclaimed piece of our old sukkah, and it has lots of holes drilled through it; I repurposed one hole to attach a piece of yarn, with which to tie back the curtain over the entrance.
(Click to enlarge.)
There are four notched beams (wood decking planks, again ripped lengthwise) running across the top of the sukkah. Well, near the top – they rest on top of the crossbeams, with their ends sticking out through holes in the panels, about a foot below the tops of the panels. These hold up the roof, which is a bamboo mat. (I think the protection of the panels prevents the wind from lifting up the bamboo mat and blowing it away, but I can’t say I’ve tested that theory. I do put some scrap wood on top of the corners of the mat, as ballast.) Here’s a view from inside the sukkah, before the mat was rolled out, in which you can see both the beams and the curtain:
(Click to enlarge.)
The beams themselves are spaced with more pieces of wood decking, ripped and notched.
After we put the sukkah together, we realized that the holes in the corner posts are also useful for routing electrical cords.
(Click to enlarge.)
The lower crossbeam facing the house (there are no plastic panels on that side, since the house provides a brick wall) was also doubly useful – we kept unused folding chairs in the space between the beam and the house.
We reused our old system for weather-proofing the electrical connections and a timer for the overhead lights, an inverted plastic container hung from a crossbeam.
(Click to enlarge.)
At some point we noticed that the panels, which are a bit flexible, were sagging and/or flapping in the wind. We ended up drilling holes in them and lashing them to the crossbeams at three points (the upper corners and center bottom) with cable ties. If at we ever have to replace any panels, I may splurge and get quarter-inch expanded PVC, which I believe is stiffer.
After the holiday, it was a cinch to take the sukkah down, and the pieces fit into the storage space we’d set aside for our old sukkah, near the ceiling in the garage – with room to spare for the boxes of lights and decorations!
(Click to enlarge.)
Those are the old Sequentia panels you see, still hanging on the garage wall. It’s amazing how little space they took up!
Acknowledgements
Materials
Tools, etc.
Click on the image to see a larger version.
Left to right: silverfish, catfish, starfish, herring (clearer in hi-res), dogfish, goldfish, and zebrafish. (Sorry – I’ve got a soft spot for corny humor!) These were part of a Purim costume – a fisherman. I thought about sewing eyes onto them but I never found the time. The kids enjoyed playing with them after Purim, anyway.
Pattern credit: allaboutyou.com
From May, 2009, to April, 2017, I produced the weekly newsletter for Congregation Zichron Eliezer (“CZE,” the synagogue formerly known as Kneseth Israel, or “KI”). It was a labor of love – a weekly exercise in copy-fitting, copy-editing (I often joked that condensing everyone’s announcements to fit on the page was good training for a career on Twitter) and information presentation.
Here are four examples which show how the layout evolved over time. My primary goals were to make the most of the space on the page, and to make it easy for the reader to find the information he/she needed. The masthead and the schedule moved around a bit. The sponsorship panel and the section headings became more streamlined and clean. Classes which repeated every week, with little variation, were removed from the “Torah” announcement space and placed in their own sidebar. I added a 36-hour weather forecast to the footer. Weekly features, like the “Kovaya Makom” announcement, were added (and, in some cases, removed). At some point, the newsletter also expanded to two pages (one sheet, front and back).
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Here are some more sample issues, with special features, all from the last year I worked on the newsletter.
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And here are some holiday editions, with extended schedules and seasonal themes. The four Purim Editions were supplements to the regular newsletter. As you an see, the usual rules didn’t apply on Purim; I only wish I’d had some sulfated castor oil to sprinkle on the faux mimeographs, so they’d smell like the real thing!
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