Aligning stars

Our dear friends who live in one of the northern suburbs invited us for dinner on Sunday. We love our friends. We would love to visit with them even if Ira didn't smoke and cure his own brisket. But the brisket made over a period of a few weeks with several complicated steps is just a tiny indication of how gracious Pattie and Ira are to us.

The stars all kind of aligned on Sunday. My client who had commissioned the baby quilt lived about twenty minutes away from Pattie and Iraso it made sense to hand over the quilt at Pattie's house. Pattie is a serious quilter and has quilted since she was in her late teens. She is really good and I was looking forward to showing the baby quilt to my accomplished friend.

We took the train northward.

As the train moved northward my eye was attracted to the industrial.

My client showed up. We had met at least once on Zoom and have emailed one another frequently during the process of making the quilt.  Over these months I have felt like I have gotten to know and gotten very fond of my client, and her family But we have never met in person.

My client was very, very happy. She was so delighted to look at all of the small details in the quilt. I watched a video of baby Charlie who will own this quilt. He is insanely cute. We talked about anticipating him lying on the quilt and deeply knowing each bit of it. We didn't squish our faces into the quilt but we talked about doing just that.

I mentioned how much I have loved having my client's family in my head for all of these months. My client mentioned that now I will be living in her family's heads going forward. Pattie had known my client's mother. We could have spent another hour hanging out, but my client went home to her family.

We ate and talked and ate more and talked more. We talked about Lionel Trains because they were such an important element of the quilt. Ira, of course, had a set. Pattie brought out an embroidered patch from her room. It was an anniversary patch made to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Lionel Trains. Pattie's father sold Lionel Trains. 

We don't see Pattie and Ira often but our relationship is made up of long threads that tangle together sweetly through the many years that we have been friends. 

We woke up the next morning, still full.

My big summer projects are done but there are new projects that have to be tackled. I am making a tallit and a tefillin bag for Ezra who is the young man who now owns the creation tallit. Ezra's father suggested stripes to echo the stripes on the tallit.

I thought that I could embroider seven stripes each one picking up a key color from the tallit. This was just a rough sketch version that I did to show Ezra and his father. 

It was OK. Ezra and his father liked the idea. Thank goodness for all of the sewing and craft books I have read over my lifetime. After mulling for a while I realized that the stripes would look much better if they were worked over cording.

When I was done it looked like this, clearly MUCH better.

The bags themselves would be made out of a length of insanely expensive home dec-midnight blue crushed velvet fabric that was given to me by my friend Welmoed. She was asked by the manufacturer to make a set of drapes and an evening gown for a drapery show. Once when Welmoed came for a visit she gave me a leftover bit from the two massive projects.  The fabric had been, as my sewing buddies say, "ripening in my stash " for many years.

I had embroidered the stripes on a piece of upholstery weight cotton-backed UltraSuede. I was then faced with how to combine the embroidered bit with the crushed velvet. I came up with a fancy solution. I made a faced window in the velvet and added the embroidery behind it.

The dark velvet confuses my camera's brain.

It is a little easier to see the actual colors in extreme close up.

I had hand-dyed the bluegreen silk ages ago for another project

I have tried and tried to do this kind of a faced window in the past and have failed miserably. The process of doing the facing and then turning it to the wrong side is so counterintuitive that succeeding feels like I have mastered some sort of a magic trick.

Tomorrow I will start on the tefillin bag embroidery.