A small job

I recently got a message from a woman who had heard that I was a good person to turn a shawl into a tallit.  I told her that I was and we met later on that day.

She brought me a beautiful olive green woven shawl woven with a lovely diaper pattern ( that's the pretty diamond woven design) and with a truly lovely woven band in red, blue and orange near the fringed ends.

When you look at the photos in this post, please be aware that for some reason my camera had trouble with the colors in this shawl and the green that looks chartreuse in the images is really a soft olive. I wasn't able to use my photo editor to get the colors to read properly. You really do have to trust me on this one.


My task with this tallit was to create corner pieces that worked with this lovely bit of woven wool.

I had hoped that I might find a bit of vintage embroidered woven or embroidered textile in my stash. While going through my pretty bits of vintage goodies was fun, nothing worked with this piece.

I then looked for other fabrics that might work.

This red wool is a lovely match with the red in the woven band. Unfortunately, as Jews living in a majority Christian country using red and green ( Christmas colors) on a tallit is a no-go.

I had purchased this length of soft orange wool twill in a Fabric Mart mystery bundle. I loved how it was such a close match to the beautiful orange in the woven band.

My client is someone who hates glitz so this lovely silk woven with metallic threads while beautiful, was a bad choice for her. 

My client chose the orange wool challis. I suppose that I could have just use the orange wool as it was. If I had then it would have looked like it was just a patch thrown onto the corner rather than something that worked with the entire piece.


I decided to create a composition of machine embroidery stitches that worked with the woven border.

Here are the pinot embroidered and turned, ready to be sewn onto the tallit.

The wool shawl was surprisingly soft and delicate. Sewing the pinot to the shawl by machine distorted the wool. Instead, I sewed the pinot on by hand.

I added a row of machine blanket stitching in green to each of the corner patches before sewing them onto the tallit. After sewing on all of the pinot it was time to make the eyelets.

I used a pair of embroidery scissors as an awl, I first poked in one blade of the scissors and then another.

The eyelet needs to be big enough to allow in the strands of wool that make up the tzitzit.

I stitched around the hole first with straight stitches pulling tightly at each stitch.

That's a functional eyelet, but it isn't very pretty. So I then did a buttonhole stitch over the simple straight stitching.

Eventually, I ended up with a pretty eyelet and then four pretty eyelets.