What I did today ( aside from laundry, updating address lists , going to morning minyan, making lunches, breakfasts...)

Today, I worked on making stripes that looked like water for my son's tallit. I cut two stencils out of index cards, after first drawing simple wave shapes on the cards with a pencil

I used two different shades of blue oil paint sticks with an occasional, sparing use of yellow, and a slightly more aggressive use of white.

This took a while, and doing this sort of repetitive work for a long period of time gets me slightly zoned out. By the time I am done, I feel like I have been under water for a long time.

Shifting from seeing the piece from a myopic perspective to seeing it the way other folks will, is always a surprise. It always amazes me when it actually looks good. So many of the small bits offer so many opportunities for unhappiness. But the

whole always looks better than it's individual parts.

These stripes really do have the look of a river.

I finished the willowy stripes as well. I have to let all of these strips sit for a couple of days before I set the color with an iron. Right now, they all smell slightly fishy. The way a food services worker's hands do after putting out platters of smoked fish for a crowd. Luckily, the smell dissipates after several hours. But it took me a while to understand why I kept seeing waitresses in black nylon dresses in the stainless steel kitchen of Temple El in Quincy, in my mind's eye, as I was trying to find the right words to describe the smell of the curing paint sticks.

I will need to assemble this tallit and put some work into the atara.

Like always, I have a few projects going at once. I have also begun work on an invitation for a client. It is promising to be a fun piece. I also have several other tallitot that are in various stages of design or construction.

Do most of you just work one piece at a time into completion? or do you work like I do, on several pieces at a time?

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sarah in nyc

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