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 stitches.

I think that there is waste fabric that is specially made and sold for the purpose. I didn't have any so I used a piece of a sheet my husband bought during his year in Paris. It had worn thin enough since 1978 so I assumed that it would pull apart easily enough.

I  began pulling the threads using my embroidery needle to coax the threads away from the fabric.

As you can imagine, it's a slow job. Pick away with the needle and then pull a thread. What had seemed like an easy job before I began started to feel like it might last forever.

This kind of work takes persistence but doesn't fully occupy the mind. My mind began to wander.

I remembered how the theme of endless tasks performed by the hero or heroine is such an important theme is mythology and in folklore.

Hercules had to clean the Augean stables.

The miller's daughter had to spin straw into gold.

I eventually switched tools from a needle to a pair of tweezers. 

The tweezers worked best when I pulled only one thread at a time.

My work surface was filled with thread nests.

I had reached the point where progress was made but it looked like a disaster.

I used my very specialized tool to clean up all of the thread bits.  Duct tape rules!

It only took two work days. but it is done

 I thought about people telling one another legends of persistence to give one another courage to finish doing an endless and endlessly boring task until it comes to an end. Why yes, you can decide that this is a metaphor for living through our own times.