Skip to main content

First fog and then trees

 While I have been working on Miles' tallit I have been trying to work out elements of Nini's tallit in my head at the same time. Nini's tallit will be evoking Nova Scotia. I have been stitching away  at the fog.



I have been adding some stitching with silver metallic thread  to get  that sense of fog.


One side of the tallit is nearly done and the other half is about halfway there.



But often when I work on one part of a piece I am problem solving about the next bit of work that I need to tackle. That next bit of work is how to create the trees. These beautiful photos are nini's and she sent them to me so I could understand what exactly she was thinking of in the Nova Scotia landscape.





My first memory of Nova Scotia was being driven from the airport to Halifax when I was five. Pine trees were part of my life in Massachusetts but the tall spindly looming pine trees that lined those roads were something else entirely.



I have been thinking about how to create those trees in fabric.

I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on hand embroidering trees. one of them gave me an idea.


I stitched these onto a pale blue linen. I really liked the look of these trees.  This is the silk that I will be using  for the tree stripes.

I practiced on a scrap of similar  but paler silk.


The dark grey just didn't show up on the green. So instead I used a lime green thread than I had on hand. It isn't the perfect fit and my husband pointed out that I need to be sure that the embroidered trees don't look like Christmas trees.






I think that I need to make the trees a bit spindlier looking to capture those Nova Scotia pines.



Here is the tree I stitched in green atop the fabric that I purchased for the tallit. I ordered an array of ten  green threads in about ten different shades of green.  Worrying about how to create the trees had been keeping me up at night. I think that I am getting somewhere. 

I stopped off in the thrist on my way to buy vegetable for dinner.


I know that I have eaten dinner  this chair somewhere but I no longer remember where. If you know, please tell me.

I very nearly purchased this plate for my husband.


It was made in 1914 to commemorate Australia's allies during the WWI. In the end I didn't purchase it. Although we do love a commemorative plate, our collection seems to be limited to British Royalty, our home towns and neighborhoods and a very narrow bit of American historical plates.  My husband was delighted to see the photo. It really was enough, even though it is a great plate.







Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...