Skip to main content

Moving right along

SAM_2869

 

When I last talked about Mike’s tallit I had just painted the letters.  Wool, unlike sort of swallows up dye. As a couple of days passed, the lettering  instead of looking shimmery and glowing looked a little sad.

 

If Mike were not such a good friend I might have just etts be or I might have thought of a simple solution.  But Mike is in that category of dear male friends that I think of as being my brothers-in-law.  They are a bit close than just being friends and get included in all family events. So I needed a better solution.

I decided to chain stitch all of the letters.

SAM_2877

Yes, it’s time consuming.

SAM_2876

Embroidering half a verse’s worth of lettering is boring. I decided to deal with that boredom by doing only parts of letters at a time. Chain stitch is fairly forgiving if you work it that way.

 

One of my older sisters used to do lots of embroidery . She is an extremely methodical person. I think if she had seen how I approached this piece of work she would have had a cow. But the important thing here is getting the work done. And eventually I got all of those letters embroidered.

SAM_2878

 

I know that the atara looks really lumpy at the moment. But this is why steam irons were invented. Wool is a fiber that can really be shaped with steam and pressure. So despite the fact that the atara looks like it survived being slept on by a large child it will look lovely once I am done with it.

SAM_2886

I also went over some of the water eddies with more hand embroidery.

SAM_2887SAM_2888

 

I also finished the pinot. SAM_2885I just have to finish the edges of the atara and sew it onto the tallit before I invite mike over to tie the tzitzit.

Comments

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 ...