Starting the next tallit

This tallit is being made for a bat mitzvah girl who shares my name. The tallit will be made out of the pictured fabrics, a chocolate brown silk noil and a pink shantung. Sarah loves these colors. With the exception of the colors, this tallit will look far more like a traditional tallit than say Sara Xing's.

I ordered the brown silk from the nice folks at Thai Silks. Finding a chocolate brown silk is harder than one would think. I have been buying from the folks at Thai Silks for years. Normally, I might have just ordered the fabric over the internet. But because I needed such a specific shade, I called up and had the person who took my order help me. I wanted a Hershey Bar brown, not a greenish brown, not a yellow brown but Hershey Bar brown. Rosi at Thai compared fabrics for me and sent me just the right color. I was so relieved when I opened the package.

When I met with Sarah, we talked about texts that she loves. One of the verses that means a great deal to her comes not from her bat mitzvah reading, but from the end of the book of Genesis. It comes from the moment when Jacob is blessing his grandchildren, Menashe and Ephraim, just before his death.
" May the angel who protects me from all evil, bless these children..." The atara /neckband will be made up of this verse calligraphed onto the pink silk.

Those verses are used liturgically during the prayers recited before sleep. They have also been set to music and are often sung as a lullaby to children.

In some of my tallitot the real focal point is in the stripe section of the tallit. This tallit will be focused on the atara, or neckband. I'm also toying with some ways to make the corners really special. Sarah's bat mitzvah is taking place the week after my son's so I really need to get cracking and get this tallit finished before my son's is done.

So far I have cut the silk to the right size and also have ripped the shantung into stripes. I will be edging the stripes with my serger and start sewing them onto the tallit this week.

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Connecting with the past

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sarah in nyc

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