Skip to main content

a sketch for Hannah's tallit


Hannah is a neighbor. She went to elementary school with my youngest. The two kids acted as if they were allergic to one another, so I never got to know Hannah very well.

Hannah met with me on Monday so we could figure out her tallit. I was so impressed with her. She came on her own. usually a bat- Mitzvah kid will come for an initial meeting with me with a parent. usually the parent serves as an editor of the kid's most wild ideas.

Initially, Hanna fell in love with a silver shantung. I'm not talking about a silk with a silvery sheen, but a shantung woven with metallic threads, it looked like tin foil. It was fabulous, but also a whole lotta look. We were finalizing the design when Hanna asked " Do you think that the silve might make me look like an alien?" I answered truthfully. That in fact, it would make her look like an alien.

She quickly replaced that choice with a silver-ey lavender. It was so interesting to see her come to the correct answer without being pushed there by an adult.


Posted by Picasa
Labels:

Comments

  1. SandyJune 18, 2009 at 5:40 PM

    Sarah, thanks for showing the layout of the tallit. I know you have described things like the neckpiece, the stripe, and the corners before. and you have shown photos, but mainly because you were showing the work detail, I haven't had a proper map (so to speak) in my head of the whole. Now I do! (that's a whole 'nother learning theory...of which I am a visual learner!)

    I like the fact that you truthfully answered the alien question!
    Sandy in the UK

    ReplyDelete

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

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
8 comments
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more