a little drunk on text

My next tallit is a great thing for a text geek like me. The stripes are being made up of ( hopefully) most of Psalm 104.

The Psalm is one of the ones which talks about the glory of nature expressing the divine. Both the language and the imagery are fabulous. My client is a serious bird watcher. My client has unfortunately been struck with a bad case of Lyme Disease which keeps her close to home.

As I calligraph the text I keep thinking about how these verses send my client's imagination outside of her four walls and out into the universe. These strips are 5 inches tall by 54 inches wide. Each strip will be folded in half. The tallit will be 27 inches wide.

We recite this Psalm at the end of services at the New Moon. By the time you get to this great Psalms though, you are so ready to go home, entirely sick of services. I try to pay close attention to the words, but other folks at morning services are late for work, so inevitably, we rush through the Psalm. It's nice to be able to slow down and pay attention to each and every word.

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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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