Skip to main content

This atara journey has ended

Usually when I finish a piece, all I can focus on is all of the little ways it is imperfect. Eventually, with a enough time and distance, I can re focus on what makes the piece good.

Elan's atara seems to be an exception to that quirk of mine.

I love this atara. I love how it works with this particular tallit.

I chose the blue and white checked ribbon because it echos the weave of the tallit. The colors are a bit too strong so I toned the strong blue down with the silver scallop stitch and i went a bit further by using a silvery grey embroidery thread to stitch the atara to the tallit.

I LOVE how the silver scallop stitch over the checkerboard feels like sun glinting off of water when the sun is a bit low on the horizon.






A Jewish ritual object unlike a painting on the wall, has to work  both close up as well as from a distance. This atara will be experienced by Elan when he holds the tallit close up to his face before donning it. It will be also experienced close up by the people who sit behind Elan at services.
An atara also has to work at a less myopic distance, as the tallit is folded up to be put away or unfolded to be worn.


Because a tallit is worn so often, and looked at so often, it is important that it yield up new visual pleasures over time.




I think that this atara can stand the test of being gazed at over a long period of time.

It is all packed up and as soon as I finish typing I go off to the post office to mail it to Elan.
Labels:

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

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more