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An exercise in frustration



A coupe of words of warning before you read this post. I realize that this post may be of zero interest to anyone but me. It is about the truly annoying process I have been going through to figure out how to do what ought to be a simple task. The finished piece will be wonderful. This particular journey has been an exercise in frustration. I guess I am writing about it because a finished piece usually doesn't show the many stumbles in the road to getting there. I am showing you all of those stumbles, but please feel free to skip this post. I promise my feelings won't be hurt.



I am making an atara ( the neckband for a tallit) with a nice kid in my synagogue who is having his bar-mitzvah next month. He came up with a pretty brilliant concept for the atara- he wanted several texts from the morning prayers on his atara. We talked about what this ought to look like. We agreed that it should look kind of like an old fashioned prayer book. Many old prayer books are typeset in a pastiche of different typefaces in different sizes. They aren't aligned with the sort of  clean and elegant aesthetic that most book designers aspire to today. I find that jumble of fonts and text sizes deeply connected to prayer.

I had planned to set the type using the Hebrew fonts on my computer. It took a bit of figuring but after several hours I had all of the text in a nice jumble of fonts but getting the texts in the correct order was as my sons' special educators used to say, a challenge. My plan was to print the texts onto some nifty prepared for running through a computer printer silk. Easy peasy! right???


Well, my computer hard drive died. We are now  having a fight with Best Buy about who is responsible for this repair, this might take a while to resolve.

My husband just closed up his office and I am now using his computer from his old office. Unfortunately his computer does not have a particularly nice array of Hebrew fonts.  I tried to download a couple of fonts but while they are somewhere on the hard drive they don't seem to want to be installed in the word processing program.(GRRRR!)

I then thought that perhaps I should just scan the texts from the prayer book I used all through high-school. I scanned all of the texts. My husband's word processing program wouldn't allow me to move the scanned images on the page.After running around and screaming I figured out that I could  upload the scans into Google Drive which allowed me to place the texts exactly where I wanted them. Yay!

GoogleDoc version of electronically cut and pasted scans

Unfortunately, the text showed up with grey backgrounds. ARRGGHH!!! I then resorted to old fashioned methods, I printed out the texts from my husband's hard drive ( black texts on white ) and cut and pasted the texts together on one page.

I scanned the new page and then printed the result onto the high tech printable silk. AAARRRGGH! the text was grey and not a crisp black!!
The text is actually straight but the silk is on top of a pile of stuff


I had a back up plan, bringing the cut and pasted text to my local copy shop, having them copy the pasted up texts using too much toner and then photo-transferring the result using iron on mending tape to transfer the image. it is low tech but a technique I have been using for twenty years.  It isn't quite as elegant as printing right on the silk..but desperate measures and all that...

I then remembered that I may not have set my scanner to scan in black and white and may have pressed the grey-scale toggle. That worked.

It only took three attempts to print out the the text on the fancy prepared silk.
Now I can start piecing the atara together. Hopefully the sailing will now be smoother.


Thank you for indulging me, and for those of you who slogged through this annoying adventure.... a small reward.


My dear friend Rachely lives in Israel. She has been posting wonderful photos of nature from her neighborhood. I have been loving her posts of flowers both wild and cultivated. Many of the flowers she has photographed have been the same as the ones I had photographed in Santa Barbara.

I have been thinking about my dear friend and images I ought to capture from my neighborhood to send to her.

When I got off the subway today I noticed the roses in what my husband has named "Spare Change Plaza", or what others in the neighborhood know as the plaza in front of the 96th Street Station. Frankly, my husband's name is pretty brilliant.








Most good photographs are a result of good cropping by the photographer.
Well Rachely, this is nature on the Upper West Side.
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