Skip to main content

White work

When I began doing the work that I do in fabric both my clients and I were seeing to work with colors that danced In those days I produced lots of work where I felt like I pushed the limits of the level of friction possible between colors.

I don't know if it is the current political situation but  this has been the summer of producing things that are white on white.


My nephew's bride is making her chuppah and asked relatives to make all white squares.



This was what I made. All summer I have been working on an atara. That too is white on white.


It has been something of a long slog.


My hands have to be clean. I will stop to wash them several times during a work session.

It's a lot of hand embroidery. while it is time consuming I can work while I am in conversation with someone.





Eventually my embroidery was completed, but i needed to finish off the piece.

This piece was supposed to be about the reflective quality of the whites.
i added machine embroidery both the the border of the piece but also to the ribbon finishing it off.

The atara is made on an old cotton damask tablecloth. You can see the raised sheen of the hand embroidery against the subtle pattern of the tablecloth and contrasting



in a quiet way against the slightly different sheen of the machine embroidery.

There is  a whole lot going on in a quiet way. All of the various shades and textures of white feel like a visual representation of the soft thrum of services led not by a cantor but by a Baal T'filla,a service leader.

Yesterday my client also asked me to make new pinot for this tallit.
 I made the pinot out of more of the table cloth. the corner pieces which will hold the tzitzit are all similar but not identical. This is a deliberate choice on my part. I want the users to know  in a visceral way that there are many ways to connect to mitzvah.


I am now most of the way finished with adding a border to the pinot.

Continuing on the theme of white on white....

I made a giant batch of noodles on Friday for two Cholesterol Death Kugels  for two different pot luck meals. 




With both the cooking and the sewing working white on white is about creating satisfying texture.

Comments

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
8 comments
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more