Skip to main content

a truly stupid idea







I have been working on a batch of challa covers. The text in the center comes from the central poem of the Friday night service. In it we are invited to greet the Sabbat Queen/bride. The challa cover makes a great wedding gift ( a bit of shameless promotion there).
For those of you interested in the technique end of things, I calligraphed the text onto heavy art paper and then cut the letters out with an X-acto knife. I then used that paper with the cut out letters as a stencil on silk shantung, filling the letters in with a Shiva paint stick. Then with a really fine brush I added what I call "hoo-has" the vine and berry pattern , around the letters using a mix of fabric dye acrylic paint and metallic powder. The border fabric is a piece of upholstery fabric that my friend Sara purchased in France.



We have been invited to an engagement party that is taking place on Saturday evening. The groom's parents are good friends. My husband suggested that the challa cover that I had intended to give as a gift for the couple need a bit more something.


I have been doing more hand beading lately. It had seemed ( at the moment) to be a lovely idea to bead a looped fringe all the way around the challa cover to add a bit of light to the edges of the piece. Well, had this been a piece that I was selling, the time I spent beading today would have doubled the price of the challa cover. It's a cute addition, not worth the hours of additional work. Most of all, doing that sort of beading is hugely boring. The only way I could finish the beading is by playing idiotic mind games with myself.






So here it is, a one of a kind I am never doing this ever again piece.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Patti HamelJune 17, 2009 at 4:26 PM

    It looks good, Sarah! You do terrific work. I can certainly understand the boredom factor.

    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