Shabbat B'reishit and the Parashat B'reishit tallit

 This Shabbat, congregations all over the world are starting the annual Torah reading cycle by reading the beginning of the book of Genesis, it is Shabbat B'reishit. I have been thinking about this Torah reading all summer. Ezra met with me before he left for a summer in camp so I could work with him on designing and making his tallit for his bar-mitzvah which is taking place tomorrow.

On paper, the idea was simple. The tallit would be made up of seven stripes, one for each day of creation. The reality though was far more complicated. 

Each stripe was a puzzle. Each puzzle had a completely different solution

On this side of the tallit, you see the days of the week from the first to the third day of the week as you move up from the hem.

On the reverse of the tallit, day five is at the top working down to Shabbat.

When the tallit is worn, Ezra will flip up the sides of the tallit.

To give you a little sense of how complicated putting this tallit together. Here are some of the techniques that I used in putting this tallit together.

• Calligraphy on fabric
• fabric painting 
• fabric dyeing
• stenciling (using stencils I cut myself)
• applique
• free motion embroidery
• machine embroidery
• hand embroidery

The first day of creation (pieced) and Shabbat ( calligraphy on fabric)were the simplest to do.

The fifth day with the fish scales and the feathers took ages to do. Those embroidered fish scales took an age to embroider. The feathers ( machine embroidery and hand painting ) also took longer than I had expected because each color had to completely dry before adding the next to keep the colors clear and to keep the feathers looking--feathery.

The fourth day of creation with the 'lights of the sky"  was a mix of hand painting and 

free-motion embroidery and applique for the sun. you see it here in an earlier messier stage

Day six --the creation of animals and people was probably the most difficult to figure out. I now know much more about animal footprints than I ever expected to know. I dyed the herringbone silk and then painted all of the footprints.

The ones that look like coffee beans are cow prints.

Day three of creation the sprouting of grasses and trees and the organization of water into rivers was done using hand painting and machine embroidery. I used my sewing machine as if it were a paintbrush 

All of the blades of grass were painted with a fine brush on dry silk and then I added more grasses by machine to look as if they were dimensional.  For the water, I painted wet on wet and then after the color had set embroidered over the watery water.

Below day three is day 2, the separation of the waters.

It was made with a mix of hand painting, machine stitching for the horizon line and then machine embroidered waves( it's the same scallop stitch I had used for the fish scales but I manipulated the stitch width as I sewed so the waves were bigger in the center and smaller at their edges.

The first day of creation was just pieced black and white silk.

You can see a bit of the atara here. The verse we used is from Genesis 2:4.

אֵ֣לֶּה תוֹלְד֧וֹת הַשָּׁמַ֛יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם

Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created

I stenciled a border on the ribbon. There is a layer of batting under the atara.

אֵ֣לֶּה תוֹלְד֧וֹת הַשָּׁמַ֛יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם 

The tallit gets picked up tomorrow.