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.

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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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