Making things that ought not get along play nicely together

Usually, when I make a tallit I meet with the person who will be wearing the tallit. As we talk, I can pick up verbal and non-verbal cues that help me design the final piece.

Right now I am working on a tallit that is a bit different. I am meeting with the person who is giving the tallit and not the person who is receiving the tallit. This makes my task a bit more difficult.

I look at my notes from the meeting. The words blue/grey, blue/silver, many shades of blue and quiet/Zen keep showing up. The buyer of the tallit loved a bit of slate blue-grey silk. That bit of silk was small and has been block printed for a different project. I don't have any more of that exact bit of silk-- I do have grey silk but with a greenish cast. I have one small bit of sapphire blue silk that is a shot silk, that is the warp threads are bright blue and the weft threads are black and that silk makes the grey read a bit bluer rather than greenish.

The tallit needs to read as something quiet and Zen. If I just piece silk stripes and call it a day the tallit won't read as Zen.

Perhaps ribbon can help. I have rolls and rolls of grosgrain ribbon in various shades of blue but none of them is exactly the right shade of blue that can tie everything together. I begin to embroider on the ribbons. I know that I can have the viewer's eye mix the right shade if I add the right colors together in the proper proportions.

I build up the color layer by layer.

The light embroidery in the center of the ribbon comes from a cone of rayon baby blue and silver embroidery yarn that was a gift from my former neighbor. It is beautiful but persnickety stuff. It's too fat to run through a sewing machine needle and breaks if its feelings are hurt. So I filled a sewing machine bobbin with the yarn and sewed with regular machine thread in the needle and the decorative thread in the bobbin. ( I sewed it upside down) I added a layer of dark blue silk embroidery thread over the silvery yarn because it improved the color and made it play better with the silks.

If I didn't tell you about the dark blue thread you probably wouldn't notice it. It does make a visual difference though. Getting the balance and design right in a tallit is a kind of visual calculous.

I love how the straight stitches get organized by your brain into curves.

As I worked on building the designs on each ribbon (each one was 130 inches or around 11 feet and most of the ribbons required four passes of stitching ,

so yeah lots of stitching) I remembered my visit on Sunday to the Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse.

When my sister used to live in New York we used to go on Mother's Day. This year I went with a friend who is an architect. My friend had never gone before and she agreed to go, to indulge me. She found herself blown away by the cleverness and artistry of the designers.

My friend was gobsmacked by a room designed by Charlotte Moss. The room evoked Morocco but instead of using the bright colors one expects from Morocco everything was done in soft blues.

The varied patterns all done in the soft smokey shades created a sense of calm. One would think that lots of pattern would create a lively jangled energy but in quiet colors instead, the many many patterns create something that is soothing and restful.

I realized as I worked that the lessons I learned ( or relearned) from Charlotte Moss were informing my work on this tallit.

Now --onto finishing off the tallit, making the atara and the pinot and a bag.

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...

sarah in nyc

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