Skip to main content

Connected ---at least in my brain

 Right now I am working on two projects that on the face of it have no connection to one another, a baby quilt and a creation-themed tallit. However, both of these projects are getting me to use the same part of my brain.

My work tends to be more symbolic and abstract rather than pictorial. The baby quilt is a memory piece and I am creating iconic books and toys from the childhood of the expectant father.


So far, I have built a car,




and a fire truck out of clothing that had belonged to the late grandmother of this not yet born baby.

Yes, all of the loose threads have pulled to the back and knotted off.

I am also building some books.


The Snowy Day is nearly done. I have to add the other lights to the traffic light, and perhaps refine the face a bit.

I am also nearly done with this 

take on the Mr. Man books. I will be making a few more of those because they are less labor-intensive than Ezra Jack Keats's lovely work. Part of my challenge is just creating the fabric collages. The other challenge is working with the fabric that I have been sent that actually belonged to the woman we are remembering in the quilt.

While I am working on the baby quilt I have also begun work on a creation-themed tallit. The tallit will have seven stripes. Each stripe will be an abstracted representation of what was created that day. Some days are easier for me to figure out than others. The first day is figured out in my head but not yet made. in a truly Jewish way, I began my work with the stripe representing the second day--the separation of the waters into the waters above and the waters below.
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יְהִ֥י רָקִ֖יעַ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַמָּ֑יִם וִיהִ֣י מַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין מַ֖יִם לָמָֽיִם׃ 
God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water.”

I began by creating the רָקִ֖יעַ which according to ancient mythology was a copper bowl.

I used a line of copper stitching. I then cut a stencil and stenciled waves in various shades of greens and blues using oil paint sticks. Today, I used a hot iron to melt away the oils and waxes and set the colors and then overpainted the strips both above and below the  רָקִ֖יעַ with diluted blue dye.


I don't have a photo of the dyed strips you will have to wait until tomorrow when the dyed strips are dry to see what it looks like. Actually, I will have to wait until tomorrow to see what the final result looks like.

I am now completely changing the topic. My husband and I were in a suburban supermarket and saw



these two unfortunately named products.  Aside from the awful names---how hard is it to put a couple of spoonfuls of either mustard or sriracha into mayo?






Comments

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 ...

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...

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 ...