Hacking my way through problems

I have been working on making a Torah mantle for the past while. The mantle is being made in memory of someone named Baruch. Developing the design for this piece was a long, long process that took a few years.

The text I am using comes from the daily prayers

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והאר עינינו בתורתך ודבק לבנו במצותיך

Enlighten our eyes with Your Torah, attach our hearts to your commandments

My client and I decided to use textiles that mattered to her and to Baruch to create the lettering. One of the textiles was a kippah worn by Baruch during the many months that he was bald from his chemo treatments.

Applique is basically collage on fabric. A few things complicate the task. One is that the base fabric for this Torah mantle is velvet. Velvet is beautiful. The wonderful nap has a tendency to shift when being sewn.

The other technical challenge is how to get the lettering onto the fabric. Early in my sewing career I attempted to attach a backing to fabric that makes it iron-on -able. The result involved lots of cursing and completely unacceptable lettering.

For long time I cobbled together a method which had me drafting the lettering on paper, flipping the paper over, tracing the lettering onto the back of the paper, basting the paper onto the back of the base fabric, straight stitching the outline of the letter and then cutting away the extra applique fabric.

That method mostly worked. The paper had a nasty tendency to shred and shift.

Finally after more than 20 years I came up with a better idea. I drafted the letters onto white fabric, first in pencil and then outlined in Sharpie. Then I flipped the fabric over and traced the letters onto the back of the fabric.

I used a spray adhesive to attach the lettering to the wrong side of the velvet.

Baruch's kippah is one of those ubiquitous needle-pointed Bukharin kippot. As I started to applique I realized that I could use this special kippah for all of the letters in the verse that make up Baruch's name. Here you can see some letters that are complete, and others in various stages of being completed.

It's still slow going but I have not cursed once. Doing this requires a small amount of X-ray vision.

I baste a bit of the kippah just under the letter.

I learned through trial and error that the needlepointed fabric and the busy pattern of the kippah made it impossible to see a straight stitched outline so instead I have zig-zagged around each letter.

It is still not all that easy to see the outline, but the zig-zag is much easier to see than a straight stitch. I then began trimming away everything that is not part of the letter. I usually use a cuticle scissor. Mine seems to have disappeared. So I went out to get a new one.

The trees on my block were so pretty so I took a few pictures on my way to get those cuticle scissors.

And then I got back to work. I'ts much easier to trim with the curved cuticle scissors.

No, I didn't draft the letters while drunk. Each line was written along an arc. I was very pleased with a giant compass I hacked out of a length of ribbon a pencil and duct tape.

Tomorrow I will begin to use some of the other fabrics. My client is worried that the mix of fabrics might create too much visual chaos. I think that the wide gold satin stitching will create a sense of visual harmony.

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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