Skip to main content

Hurray!! Sara-Beth's tallit is done

I like productive days. Yesterday I sewed the pinot, corner pieces onto Sara-Beth's tallit. I also sewed the eyelets by hand, ( I love the way they look). In addition, I did the lettering for the atara/neckband. The text that Sara-Beth chosefor her atara is a wonderful one. It comes from one of the Psalms we recite every morning, "(God) counts all of the stars and calls them all by name".



I like that every morning I get to re-think the work on this tallit as I chant those verses. I also love how each element in this tallit, the tallit itself, the corner pieces and the atara all reflect the verse. They aren't identical but they all work well together, ( kind of like my kids).



The atara is made out of a black tussah silk. It's got a heavy horizontal weft and the fibers themselves have the slightly rough texture of a raw silk. It's a subtle but nice contrast to the slubby rough textured even weave of the rest of the tallit.



Sara-Beth, I think, had expected me to use only the first half of the verse. I really wanted to use both halves. I like the interplay of the cosmic and the personal in that verse. I realized that if the first half of the verse was written in a curve, then I could add the second half of the verse under the arc of the first several words.



This is the sort of task that used to make me crazy, it was just so difficult for me to do. But when you do something often enough, eventually you improve. I marked out two co-centric curves on the silk using a piece of sidewalk chalk. I painted the first half of the verse, using a mix of acrylic paints, fabric dyes and artists gold, beginning with the last letter ( so I wouldn't smudge any of the letters). It worked. So I added the second half of the verse underneath. A line of machine stitching in gold outlines the letters and makes them look finished.






When I was done outlining the letters, I notices that I had some drops of silver paint on the atara. I decided that rather than starting again, I would add more droplets to look like more stars. ( Another artistic decision made to fix a flub!)






Tomorrow , Sara-Beth comes by to tie her tzitzit. I hope that she will be happy with her new tallit.






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more