A question to ponder.....

A query from a potential client a week or so ago got me to thinking. The potential client's question was primarily about pricing ( and why my work is more expensive than a gift shop tallit). This Shabbat I had a lovely conversation with Ayelet's father about her tallit. He said, "We didn't realize that when you meet with a client, you have no idea of what that tallit will look like ahead of time."

My initial reaction was, " Of course I don't, the tallit is created for that particular client. I have no idea what we will design together, until after we have talked and figured it out together."

Both those conversations had me exploring the internet to see what others mean when they advertise their work as " One of a kind" or "hand crafted" in the world of tallitot.

I am not going to post photos of the work of other people's tallitot. But you can Google the phrases " one of a kind tallit " or "hand crafted tallit" and see what appears on your screen.

Most of what is sold as "hand crafted" could be more aptly described as "manufactured to look like hand crafted". If you go into any Judaica store around the country you will see the identical walls of Jerusalem motif appearing in exactly the same way, or the identical floral design in batik. I assume that the wax outline is machine printed on hundreds of yards of China silk and is colored in by unskilled labor. calling that sort of work "hand crafted " is a bit of a stretch, at best. If there were actual variations in the designs I would feel differently, even if the designs were fairly similar.

These descriptions of essentially manufactured talllitot as hand made,one of a kind made me realize why the potential client balked at my pricing. I was using the same words but meaning something entirely different.

Machine woven silk striped tallitot are touted as hand crafted. Are they small batch manufactured? Yes. Are they hand crafted, not really.

So now I want to explore what one of a kind actually means. I have assumed that it means exactly that. A singular, a one off. Not another exists just like it.

I don't think that a manufactured dress shirt that is monogramed and selected in a particular fabric counts as one of a kind. If you chose an item out of a catalog and selected a fabic and a color and a monogram, I suppose that that counts as a custom shirt, not a one of a kind shirt.

What many tallit makers are selling as one of a kind, falls into that "custom" category. When you go on their sites you see tallitot that essentially all look alike and you can choose the colors of ribbons that are used to create the stripes.

I'm not saying that the tallitot other people sell aren't attractive. Some of them are quite beautiful. But I feel irked when their work is sold as one of a kind, when it is one of several hundred and is customized rather than actually being one of a kind. I get annoyed when work is sold as hand crafted when it is really small batch manufactured.

Do I need to change how I describe my work if the terms I use, now mean something different than the words that I'm using? What would you call work that is designed and created individually for each client? How ought to I describe what I do?

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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