A tallit, a dress, and a visit to Ellis Island

Creating a piece for a client is always about balancing various sets of needs. Often my client is a twelve year old kid with their own strong opinions. Sometimes the parents have strong opinions. Clearly, (and anyone who knows me for more than five minutes can tell you) I am a person with opinions on things, particularly Jewish ritual objects.

This has been especially true in the making of Alice's tallit. A big part of my job has been taking what she has felt strongly about and making it work in the context of a tallit. Alice loves orange and red. neither would be my first, or even tenth choice on a tallit. Never the less, it is important that she be heard.

There are lots of tallit makers that combine lovely ready made ribbon to make a tallit. I use a mix of embroidery stitches and utility stitches ( the sorts of stitches you might use to mend torn trousers or to install elastic into a pair of underpants) to embellish the ribbon and the stripes into a composition of color and texture.

I am a chunk of the way through creating the stripes on Alice's tallit.

Red and orange tend not to play together well-- kind of like two toddlers in daycare both with massive personalities and short tempers. I really like making things that ought not to work together become visually pleasing.

With enough texture and color things that ought to look out of key can sing in harmony.

I also completed the dress I am wearing to my nephew's wedding . My first attempt at making the sequin dress failed. Or put more honestly, I made a series of errors that built on one another and ended in failure.

The fabric I had ordered was no longer available. There was a different sequin fabric available...and it was on sale for half of what I had paid. I spent $4 per yard for $40 per yard fabric.

I ended up with this.

The hemline swings longer and wider in the back.

All of the raw edges have been finished with silk binding

The embroidered netting I had planned to use as an overlay (here it is over the silver sequined fabric)

looked crazy over the two toned sequins so I just didn't do it. That fabric will have to wait for another dress.

Earlier this week we visited Ellis Island with cousins from out of town. I loved the exhibit on things people brought with them. It included lots of needlework.

My husband and I were struck by how beautiful the building is.

This is the Hebrew one needed to be able to read to pass the literacy test instituted in the 1920's. It's really hard Hebrew

The texts people had to read in other languages were also Biblical verses but were far more familiar than these obscure lines from Proverbs

This is what people got to eat during their time on Ellis Island.

These were the marks chalked on the coats of immigrants so they could be inspected further by medical staff.

My grandfather arrived at Ellis Island with his cousins. My grandfather came on his cousin Pinchas Freider's ticket. My grandfather Yankle was not listed on the ship's manifest. He needed to have a hearing to decide if he would be allowed to enter New York. That hearing took place in this room.

Luckily, the judgement was in favor of my grandfather.

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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