From sketch to part of the way there

 

After a long pause, it was time to get back to work on Y’s tallit. Above you see the sketch I had made for Y during our initial  meeting. You can see that the sketch is pretty, well sketchy. The point of the sketch is to give my client ( and me) a visual reminder of what the final tallit will look like.

 

One of my quirks about tallitot has come from my years of going to services. I tend to look around at the tallitot that the people who sit in front of me are wearing. In woven tallito the stripes read on both sides of the tallit. So when you flip the tallit over your shoulders the stripes on the top layers interact with the stripes on the lower layers. It looks great. If however you wear an appliqued tallit, the underside of the tallit is often distressingly white and naked looking. Clearly most tallit makers don’t share my horror of   blank bottomed tallitot.  I deal with my horror of the blank backed tallit by appliqueing and embroidering stripes to the under side of the tallit.

This is the stripe for the under side of Y’s tallit. I stitched the painted pomegranate strip to the tallit base with two layers of stitching,in purple and in gold metallic.

 

The gold picks up the gold highlights in the pomegranates . It also will catch the light when Y moves.

This is the stitching on the reverse. I like how the two stitch patterns intersect with one another.

 

I also began working on the atara. this is stage one of the work. I will add some machine stitching to jazz things up.

When Y and her mother met with me they brought some scarves that had belonged to Y’s grandmother who had just died. they were pretty, but too subdues for Y.  I realized the other day that I could border the wider striped with bias strips cut from the scarves.

 

Any of you who sew know how difficult it is to cut chiffon accurately. Cutting bias strips out of chiffon can lead one to to curse very easily.

 

I discovered a great tool to help me cut boas strips fairly accurately.

 

 

My floorboards were the perfect width. More accurately, I decided that the could be the perfect width.

There is more work to be done, but I’m well on my way. Working today has helped me to solve some problems I was having with some aspects of the piece that I will be starting down the road, like the pinot and the bag.

Keep reading and you will see the problems that I have figured out.