Skip to main content

Well, not exactly done

talking about the trip.

I have been going through my photos and there are some things that I really wanted to share. I will try and see if I can organize some of this into coherent bits.
One big category of great stuff I saw was needlework.

The visitor's center in the city of Akko in Israel had an exhibit of these wonderful needle painted works done on old textiles.


The pieces were up on the walls, but with no explanatory notes.

I love how the old linens are transformed by the new embroidery.









I can tell you nothing about the artist who made these wonderful pieces.

In the shuk just a few steps away you could buy these shoes covered with traditional Arab embroidery.


If I had normal feel that could fit into normal shoes I would have bought myself a pair in a heartbeat.

One of my favorite things in Rome were the ecclesiastical supply stores, particularly the ones where it was possible to buy priestly robes.











I noticed that some of the mosaic altarpieces were made to resemble fabric.

There were some wonderful examples of outrageously elaborate handwork in the church collections in both Rome and Florence.




In this piece the individual flowers were first painted and then appliqued onto the base fabric.



You can see all the different kinds of work used to create this piece.



I really fell in love with the painted and appliques flowers.







 Italy prides itself on its excellent gloves.




I bought my daughter a pair of beautiful gloves.

We discovered on our last night in Florence that we had stayed around the corner from this excellent atelier





 You could get garments custom made for you or if you wanted you could learn how to draft and make garments on your own.







Well, that's enough eye candy for one day. I will post some more tomorrow.

Comments

  1. Beautiful textiles, and stories about them.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...