The difference a bit of thread makes

Now I’m working on constructing the other stripes for Linda’s tallit. The top photo shows the stripe unit before I added the decorative stitching, the lower photo with the stitching. It just looks better with the stitching. as I add the decorative stitching two thoughts keep going through my head. the first is the Bauhaus dictum of “Form follows function”.  The decorative stitching looks cute, but more importantly strengthens a potentially weak place in the tallit. Shantung shreds like crazy. By reinforcing the back of the stripe with iron on interfacing and then stitching over the seam allowances with dense decorative stitching will keep the silk from failure for a long , long time.

The other  thought that keeps running through my head as I look at the intense red, purple and orange is how much those rich almost identical colors remind me of my favorite Barbie dress from when I was a little girl. My friend Paula owned the dress. it was a strapless evening gown made in emerald green turquoise and sapphire blue satin.The intensity of those colors next to one another blew me away. I love to recreate that intensity when I work with color. not every cliet gets into that almost scorching color combination.

I do know , that Linda who will be owning this tallit gets this color combination. Several years ago, Herta, Linda’s mom set up a kiddush table with rows of huge bowls of  black and red plums, cherries and dark red grapes. The imbalanced color intensity of those many bowls of fruit  was simply spectacular. looking at this tallit stripe, I realized that it echoes the colors in Herta’s bowls of fruit.