tallitot talking to one another

While pieces of the design process take place before I even put my hand to fabric, there are always improvements that take place as I work. Often, work on one piece gives me ideas that I then apply to a different piece.

I have been playing with stencils lately. My son's tallit has those naturalistic looking green willow leaves. Elisa's tallit has that ornate Florentine architectural stencil in gold.

As looked at Sara's tallit, I realized that it looked a bit dour. It needed a bit more of-- something.

The something came by way of stencil. I cut a stencil out of an index card and applied gold colored oil paint stick through the stencil. In each case, while the technique may be identical, but the look is not at all the same ( or even similar) . I particularly like how in Sara's tallit the colors of the tallit, very mid-century colors, influenced the modern look of the stencil.

I also found it fascinating to see how the same paint stick applied to the red/ maroon was almost garish. On the pink it is very subdued.

While the three tallitot all look very different, they are siblings of sorts being worked on at the same time with lessons learned on one tallit being applied to another.

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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!!!

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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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