Moving right along

Today ( and yesterday) I pretended that I was drawing with my sewing machine and made feathers for Natalee's, Wings tallit. I really enjoyed how easy it was to adjust the width of my stitches, making it easy to taper the tips of the feathers down to nothing, giving the whole thing a more naturalistic feel.

Natalee was adopted from China. When kids come from a mixed background, as Natalee does I like to try to aknowledge their place of orgin in the tallit.  I don't want the tallit to look costume-ey. But being able to nod to the birth family at this important milestone is probably a good thing.

Natalee liked the idea but didn't want the tallit too look too Chinese. We found the prefect solution in my fabric stash.  This Chinese brocade silk  fabric has large flowers as part of the brocade design. Some are blue, and the others are green. We thought that having the blue flowers in the center of each corner piece--with just a hint of the red background would be perfect. The eyelets will be in the center of the flowers.

I backed each of the flowers with white shantung. They are ready to be sewn on once the whole tallit is assembled.

One of the nice things about working with brocade is that the reverse of the design gives you the lines you need for cutting. I cut just a few threads past the blue. As I made the vertical cuts I realized that the design of the fabric may look like a loose arrangement, the symmetry is pretty rigid and it was easy to choose markers in the design that allowed me to make straight cuts without the fuss of measuring.

If you look at the upper left of this photo, you can see some of my labors on the wings, (I took the photo about midway in my work.) as well as the cut out corner piece. The silk beneath my work is the silk that will be used for the tallit. I did the super- tedious job of pulling a thread for the entire two yard length of the tallit so that I had a perfectly straight line to follow when I cut the fabric

I realize that I will need to angle the wings on the tallit giving them a real, bird in flight, look.

And these photos are taken with my new camera which seems to have fewer fears of shimmer and gleam.