Connecting with the past

I know that often in my work I manage to make too much work. I can take a crazy hodge podge of wild colors and textures that ought to be fighting against one another and get them to play together nicely. Cavill's tallit though is all about restraint. It is just black and white. 
You might think that I would be fighting against the restraints that this simplicity imposes on me, but I really love it. One advantage of thcreating something with a riot of details is that some of the niggeldy technical bits can be hidden underneath all of the glitz and glitter.

I had stitched each white panel of text to it's black partner, treating each one like one unit. I then stitched the panels to the main body of the tallit.
This side has a clean seam.

The other side has raw edges that need to be covered.

Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there are lots of ways to cover a seam. If i hadn't had a series of long conversations with my client, I might have covered the seam with a ribbon with some metallic silver or gold in it. My client really wanted the stark black and white of a traditional tallit.  One of the things I love about working with clients is that listening to their needs and understanding their taste opens me to make choices I might not have made on my own--sometimes those choices are better than the ones I might have made on my own.

After experimenting a bit, I realized that in this case, machine stitching the ribbon over the seam was actually not going to be a good choice. i played a bit with various threads and stitches and finally decided on a pick stitch in white buttonhole-twist thread.

For those of you who don't sew, that's a heavy thread.

I love how the tiny stitches add a tiny sparkle of light to the black gros-grain ribbon.

It is in many ways a tiny detail that makes all the difference in the world. My stitches are small and neat and just slightly irregular.  I think the irregularity is actually a good thing here.

I am not quite done with this batch of slightly insane hand work. I am really glad that I made this choice. I think the rest of this tallit will go quickly.