Mending the past and a smidge of Food Friday

I have been working away on repairing Hilary's tallit.

The striped section comes from Hilary's great grandfather's tallit and is probably well over a century old. I sandwiched the striped section of the tallit in nylon netting and have been stitching away repairing the most damaged bits.

I had thought that I would mostly use machine stitching to repair this piece. I have slowly ended up doing most of the work by hand.

I had initially thought that edging the tallit with blanket stitching was the smart thing to do.

I am now starting to think that lots of straight stitching may be a better idea.

The stitching ends up working a bit like weaving strengthing the failing fibers.

Working, I can't help but think about the passage of time, not just the hours I have spent on this piece but also the lives of the people who owned each element that makes up this tallit. I think about memory and old hurts that change over time.

I work with lots of old textiles. Many of them are mended. There is always so deeply personal about the mends. There is never a standard way to approach a mend. Sewing books will offer suggestions but each fabric failure is different and requires a slightly different solution.

The mends always give you a sense of the hand and mind of the mender.  Often those mends take place over a period of many years and are a map to the history of that piece of fabric.

As I work I think that I am nearly done, and then I see another bit that is damaged and needs to be repaired. At some point, I guess I will simply decide that I am done.

It's Friday and I have been cooking.

This is what has been rubbed onto tonight's beef. I believe that it is coffee, allspice, turmeric, black pepper, hot paprika and cayenne pepper.
there will be other food on the table, but I won't bore you with it this week except to say that we will be eating well.

Our table will be set with

 an Indian bedspread topped with a vintage linen cross-stitched tablecloth. The linen is crude and greyish in color.

I like the way it looks with our grey plates and black napkins.