sarah in nyc

 I had promised Jess that her tallit would be wearable by Rosh Hashanah. It was.  The atara though, was not yet completed. I worked on hand embroidering the letters through a nasty head cold. I used hand dyed silk embroidery threads. I used them because they evoked the colors in the watercolors that Jess's late mother had used in her beautiful sketch books filled with little watercolor landscapes, color studies, poetry, and reflections on what she was seeing and thinking. This seemed like a lovely way to include Jess's mother who had died completely unexpectedly not long ago. Once I was done with the embroidery I backed the atara with two pieces of crisp drapery fabric to give it just the right amount of body. I cut the atara to size and rough edged the three layers with my serger. Then it was time to create a binding. I embroidered one edge of this beautiful blue and white striped satin ribbon with a teal scallop stitch. I planned to fold the ribbon along the dark blue center...

The other day, I had a lovely initial conversation with a potential client about the possibility of my making her a tallit. She wanted to know if  weaving a tallit was something that I would ever do. The truth is, that in my youth I had fantasies about weaving and becoming a weaver. A friend even gave me a loom to play with. And as I typed this I remembered using a simple back strap  loom in high school. The reality is that I have entirely the wrong brain and personality for  large scale weaving.  Well, I had done some of that wild wooly and hairy weaving that was so big in the 1960s and 70's. But the sort of weaving that one does for a tallit where you meticulously plan every bit of the piece before you begin to work and there is no room to improvise once you have begun just doesn't work for me at all. So often, while I have a plan for my work I will often have to improvise in a way that don't work with classical weaving. Jerry's atara is a case in point.  It's...