Skip to main content

Being Coy

 

Yesterday I was invited to a suburban synagogue and  asked to come up with some ideas for their ark curtain that badly needs to be replaced.  The synagogue is quite beautiful. I think that the a good ark curtain design can make their sanctuary work a bit better both visually as well as symbolically.  it’s nice to work on something that will tweak a good thing to better, rather than working in a space that is terrible.

The synagogue has acquired some real treasures of Jewish ceremonial art. My jaw was on the floor seeing both what this synagogue has for regular use as well as what they have in their museum.

They asked me to come up with a few ideas for them. I came up with five. ( I could come up with more ideas, but five is more than enough.) I’m being coy because I want the powers that be at that synagogue to have the first crack at looking at the designs I came up with. It’s only fair. I am, however showing all of you snippets of each design.

 

I am going to share how I set up my sketches. I photographed the ark and turned the image into a black and white. I then painted my ideas on tracing paper. I scanned my work with the black and white photograph and emailed my proposal to the synagogue. Hurray for technology!

 

This is a gig that I would really like to have. I hope they fall in love with my ideas.princeton 3

princeton (2)

princeton 1princeton 4

princeton 5

Comments

  1. What a nice complement to you. I hope that they love one of your designs. I find that giving too many choices makes it very hard for clients! They have trouble making up their minds.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Nancy K! If I ran the world I would develop what the piece looked like with the congregation...but I don't run the world. I will see what develops...while I was there the rabbi spoke to me about new Torah mantles... It would be soooo nice.

    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

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...