a tutorial of limited use....

I tend to be great at coming up with fabulous products , but they have only a severely limited audience. ( Clip on skis for baby strollers, for those few snowy days when the city hasn't plowed yet.)

This tutorial is a really good one for the vast audience out there of Torah mantle makers. I guess it's good too if you have a great need to cover a wooden form with a hole or two or more in it.

Most Torah mantles are made like wrap around skirt permanently attached to a hard flat frame with two holes in it to allow the wooden rollers ( or atzei chayyim) to stick out of the top. Usually this wooden top is made out of wood, these days out of plywood. I have, however, seen several older Torah mantles where this hard top is made out of several layers of newspapers. Clearly, this is not the best choice if you want the mantle to look good for a long time.

I have been working away on the mantle in memory of my father and with my son's bar mitzvah 61 days away--I need to get going on constructing the mantle. when I have made mantles in the past, I have padded the wooden top and then I hand stitched the "skirt" to the top. The disadvantage of this method, is that you then have a not so tidy join that then is usually covered by decorative braid. ( Oh! that's why most Torah mantles have that decorative braid!!! it isn't there for religious reasons but for functional ones.)

My friend John Dobbin who is the superintendent at my synagogue, was kind enough to make the wooden top for this mantle. I was blown away by the care he took in making it. When we examined the Torah scrolls in the ark, we began discussing construction methods. he asked about the braid and then suggested to me that if I constructed the mantle "like a bag" then I wouldn't need to do the hand stitching.

I plan to attempt to construct this mantle in this clean finish way. But I needed to cover the mantle top with fuse able fleece so here is the tutorial of limited usage.

This is the lovely Torah mantle top that John made for me.

Mantle top with fuseable fleece

Here, I am establishing the cutting line by drawing around the mantle top with a Sharpee . I am holding a pencil between the edge of the mantle top and the marker so I have enough of a seam allowance to pull the fleece to the underside for a tidy edge. I learned this method of tracing from some discussions about how to trace Burda patterns.

Cutting the fleece. I'm very impressed that I can take photos with only one hand.

Cutting pie wedges out of the center of the circles, . If I simply cut on the line I would ultimately end up with a messier edge.

Fusing the fleece to the wood, using a cotton napkin as a press cloth. This way I end up with both a fused mantle top and an ironed napkin. I had purchased this fleece for use in a different project. it was too thin for my needs. Rather than stopping my work to go downtown to buy thicker fleece, I used two layers, fusing the second layer to the first.

The underside of the mantle top with two layers of fleece fused to it. You can see that the edges are also covered by the fleece. you can see the Sharpee marks. but since this fleece covered form will be covered in dark blue velvet, there is no need to worry about the pink marks showing through.

A Torah mantle top, neatly covered in fleece. Hurray!!!

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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