The hamsa is a hand-shaped amulet, believed by some to offer protection against the evil eye. It’s all superstition, of course, but some fun imagery to play with. I purchased the cut file from etsy and did a few variations. I have seeming mountains of fun paper and wanted to see what I could make that has some dimension. The text is “shalom” in Hebrew text, which means peace.
The hanging one is roughly 7x10, blue paper glued to 0.1 chipboard, cut, then contrasting blue glued to the back. The text is another layer of paper on chipboard. A mishap in the settings meant a portion behind the text didn’t cut through and I couldn’t get it out safely. Live and learn!
The two smaller ones are about 4.5x6 and paper on thinner board. I managed to get settings that made little enough soot that I don’t have to mask. Woot!
If you use Windows then the core system fonts have lots of different scripts in them, including Hebrew. Fire up Character Map, select one of Arial, Times New Roman, or Tahoma and scroll through more glyphs than you thought should be in any one font file. The shapes in those fonts might meet your needs without needing to buy another font.
This is New Peninim Bold, and came already installed on my '07 MacBook. I’ve also got Arial Hebrew and a few others that came with. Plenty of others out there for download.
