Weighing Choices

the last time I posted about Charlie’s tallit my big decision was which fabric to use for the atara. I ended up choosing the wool broadcloth.

My next step was painting the letters onto the wool. I began with by painting the lettering with a flat tipped brush with black and then I outlined the letters with gold paint.

I was planning to embroider around the letters. I wasn’t sure if I would machine embroider or work by hand. Each have certain advantages. Machine embroidery is faster, but fiddlier. What I end up doing is essentially using the sewing machine as a paint brush. While it is doable with a whole verse full of lettering one needs to be in the right mood to approach the task.

I was going through a mild case of food poisoning from a restaurant meal and frankly my ability to focus was not at it’s best. I decided to hand embroider around the letters. It would take longer but worked with how my brain was working.

Before I could start though, I needed to support the fabric. If you attempt to embroider on flimsy floppy fabric you will want to tear your hair out and do lots of cursing. There are lots of ways to beef up fabric to make embroidery easier.

If I were doing this 100 years ago I might have pasted some paper to the back of the fabric I planned to embroider. The 2015 method of doing the same thing is to iron on a fusible interfacing. Fusibles sometimes unpeel from their backing with age. This tallit will be getting lots of wear, and will be folded and unfolded daily. I decided to go with a longer lasting choice.

Instead I just basted another layer of wool behind the painted strip of wool. Basting keeps the layers of wool from shifting as I do the embroidery. This is a step that I used to regularly skip.

Now I baste when it will make my life easier.

I had two different gold threads to choose from, and I had thought that I would outline the letters in an embroidery stitch known as--- wait for it------- outline stitch. I tested out both threads.

I voted for the darker thread. I also realized that I didn’t love the look of the outline stitch and decided to outline all of the letters with a chain stitch.

I have been listening to podcasts and have been working away. The food poisoning is now gone and the letters are mostly outlined.

This evening I went to a Shiva house. I was rewarded on my way home with what has been called Manhattan hedge where the setting sun lines up with the grid of the Manhattan streets. I took these photos while standing in the middle of the street.

I was not the only person standing in the middle of the crosswalk taking photographs.

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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