Skip to main content

Plugging away

So Deborah did love the black kippah I had made her. Unfortunately, it was a bit too small. I had no more of the wonderful black textured fabric. I did have a plain black silk. I thought that the silk satin would be improved with more texture. So I began quilting diagonal lines a presser-foot's width apart creating a gid of squished diamonds along the entire strip of 45" x7 " inch piece of fabric.

I kept thinking as I worked on thins that my daughter would take one look at this and say,  "Having an OCD day, Mama? ". Not exactly. I find doing this sort of work alternatively irritatingly boring and oddly soothing. You may think to ask why I chose such a labor intensive way of adding texture. I wonder myself. Actually, I think that this Chanel-bag like quilting will suit Deborah well. Deborah is one of those women, who even if she wore a tie dye t-shirt and a tiered peasant skirt would look like she stepped out of a Brooks Brother's ad. This quilting will suit her.


So to keep my self from killing myself as I work, I am alternating work on the kippah on work on the wings tallit. I cut away various layers of the metallic/silk organza. A different sort of obsessive work. One of the other reasons that I was doing the quilting is that I was buying time, trying to figure out the best way to proceed with the wings.

I found the large spool of ivory colored embroidery thread. I have been playing with the width and the density of the stitches. The lack of regularity makes the feathers look a bit more naturalistic. As, always, the work looks like a bit of a mess while in progress, but will look lovely when done.

I also cut the charmeuse for the tallit to size. What delicious silk. This tallit will feel so wonderful on.


Comments

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...

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...

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 ...