The old, the new and the imperfect

Last Friday we drove to the wedding.  We spent Shabbat with dear, dear friends. My older sister hosted a Friday night dinner for some of us out-of- towners. We attended the auf-ruf on Shabbat morning and had the pleasure of hearing my nephew read Torah and the Haftarah.

As we walked back and forth through Newton

each street name was full of memories. I never lived in Newton but many of my classmates did. Grant Street, Hobart Road, Langley Road, Cotton Street, Park Lane Street, Ballard Street, each street name evoked a person, a relationship, parties invited to, parties not invited to.....

Sunday morning friends and family gathered for the wedding. Friends, readers of this blog as well as my sewing buddies have asked me to show photos of me in my dress. 

My cousin Eunice who often serves as the family documentarian took these photos of me at the beginning of the festivities.

We (that means my husband at the wheel) drove home after the wedding and thanks to his focused driving we got home in record time.

Tuesday I got back to work on Alice's tallit.

Any of you who went to kindergarten, or have ever read a fashion magazine or read one of those click bait posts about what not to wear know that mixing red and orange in the same garment is just a bad idea, ( well, unless you are a fabric designer at Marimekko).

In this tallit I have been asked to do exactly that, combine red and orange and gold and bronze and copper---and it has to read as a tallit, and look elegant, coherent and essentially Jewish.

I suppose that there is more than one way to approach this problem. I have found that one good way to make colors that ought not play well together appear visually harmonious is by mixing them carefully.

I have been layering threads and ribbons and stitches together, combining elements that one might expect to be shouting at one another having a bright and charming conversation.

Many of the stitches I have used are not embroidery stitches at all but are utility stitches designed to do things like attach elastic to a half slip or a pair of underpants. 

Some of the threads I have used are meant for machine embroidery, one of them is a finely spun poly meant for commercial garment construction another was designed for use in knitting machines and not at all for machine sewing. 

At times I felt like I was whipping up a gourmet meal out of Velveeta, Cheeze Whiz and Wonder Bread and actually making it taste like real food.

I also want to take a moment to talk about perfection. Products made in factories are expected to be perfect. Craftspeople following a set of directions written, by others expect perfection from themselves.

If you carefully inspect this tallit I am sure that you will find places where my machine skipped a stitch. Aside from the first ribbon where I marked where to sew by pulling a thread all of the rows of stitching have been laid out by eye. I have used a particular spot on my sewing machine foot as the placement guide for the next row. Those by eye measurements are pretty good, but imperfect. There are some wobbles in there.

In making this tallit, while I have a general map in my head of where I end up. Each row of stitching is a decision about the composition of the piece as a whole.  How does each element connect to the others? 

Often that tension between the perfect and the imperfect keeps your eye interested in a piece of work. I was fortunate to attend synagogue at Temple Beth El in Quincy. My father worked closely with the artist David Holleman  on the creation of the space. Surrounding the Aron Kodesh was a large mosaic frame with depictions of the twelve tribes below and their celestial representations in the zodiac above. 

Attending synagogue every Shabbat I spent lots of time looking at those mosaics. As a little rigid kid I was often disturbed by how Mr. Holleman used to clearly, deliberately use a few tiles in the wrong color in the middle of a field of color. Now, I know that this was not a error but a deliberate choice.

I sat in that sanctuary week after week until I left for college. I can tell you that each and every time there was something new for me to look at.

Those mosaics tragically no longer exist. The two pieces you see here are part of our collection at home, both purchased by my husband and by me. These mosaics are both a visual reminder of my childhood. I didn't go to art school. I did learn how to create art by my years of living inside a piece of art.

When I was wandering through the great churches of  Rome and Florence with my husband last year I was struck over and over by the hand of the craftsman as expressed in the things that were just slightly off, a misplaced tile, a stencil not quite registered, a carefully lined doorway with just a tiny jog of paint. All of those slight bits of being off make the place dynamic.

So too with this tallit that turns a whole bunch of elements that really ought not to go together at all into a coherent whole.