Getting towards the finish line

Rachel had wanted a black and white checked border next to the wave. I tried. I just couldn’t make it work. Instead, she got a black and white pieced bias stripe border. to make up for the lack of checkerboard I added a row of stitching in a nifty checkerboard stitch in gold.

The outer edge of the stripe is made up of black middy braid to which I added the wave stitch. Unlike most pieced tallitot/prayer shawls the design is on the underside of the tallit as well. this tallit is particularly small, but Rachel is a small kid. She would look silly in a tallit that was much bigger.

The bag was fun to make. I first fused black shantung to needle punch interfacing.Then I stitched waves freehand using a chartreuse rayon thread. I added more delicate waves with a multicolored metallic thread. I used a chunk of dressmaker’s chalk ( thank you Anne!) to sketch out the letters for Rachel’s name. I went over the chalk line with a wide satin stitch in gold. The letters needed a bit more---more, so I added peacock colored iridescent large seed beads. I have been doing lots of hand beading lately.

I lined the bag by serging the periwinkle blue shantung lining to the black embroidered outside of the bag. I covered al of the edges with grosgrain ribbon and stitched the wave motif to hold it all into place.

I have already pieced three of the corners, I still have to do the fourth, add the lettering and then get those corners into place. each corner will be pieced black and white silk. I like the visual fun of different corners. I also think that it is a good visual reminder that there are many ways to approach the divine.

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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!!!

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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