A Day in the Life

My work day is rarely ever of a piece. I usually end up weaving my client work time in with other domestic chores. Yesterday, after breakfast, I got a loaf of bread going. As the day went on, I tended to the bread in little bits as needed. It was baked before my son got home from school.

I also did a huge load of hand wash along with tons of machine washing.

My son is applying to High School this year. For those of you NOT living in New York City, think college application but with much less information about the schools available, many fewer choices and much higher stakes. It's awful. I need to spend some time each day setting up appointments to visit schools or dealing with other inanities of the process.

I also managed to get some work done on Hannah's tallit. Hannah's tallit is made out of silk shantung. Shantung is lovely to sew because unlike a chiffon, it's easy to cut. Unlike a charmuse, it does not slide around as you sew. The down side of shantung is that it shreds. The weft slides out of the weave of the fabric and I end up tangled up in long threads of silk. These threads find their way all over the house. When I sew with shantung, inevitably, when I am outside I will look down and see that my tights are totally covered in long strands of silk.

I think about the Bauhaus dictum of " form follows function " a whole lot as I work. I added the decorative stitching to Hannah's tallit mostly to help prevent future fabric shredding. If I stitched the seam lines with decorative stitches, it gives the fabric additional strength and the weft won't start sliding out.

I used a beautiful bronze/black fine metallic thread that I had purchased at School Products, the yarn store just north of the Flatiron building. It's a fairly delicate thread that always tended to break when I used it on my old Pfaff machine. Sewing on my new Janome, the pesky yarn behaved itself quite well. I love how it adds glimmer but not flash to a piece. I also have fallen in love with the decorative stitches my machine offers.

So in the end, it was a productive day. My son fell in love with the school we went to visit last night. Let's see where he ends up going to school next year.