Liat's tallit now---complete with Atara!

When I last posted I was hopeful but unsure if I would be able to finish the Atara for Liat's tallit. I began embroidering the letters on Friday and started up again right after Havdalah. I finished the last bits of embroidery on Sunday.

With the embroidery completed, I had to remove the cotton that was marked with the lettering.

The cotton fabric gets removed thread by thread.

Tewing catalogs are filled with specialized tools for many different sorts of sewing tasks. Below is the best task for the job.

As I worked I thought about all of the many folktales in many different traditions that all have the hero working away at a giant task until it is completed. I wasn't Hercules cleaning out the Royal stables but this took patience.

If I had unlimited time I would have perhaps filled in the letters with embroidery. I didn't have unlimited time. I wanted the colors to have the same chromatic shift as the tallit stripes.

I decided to fill in the lettering with oil paint sticks. Forgive me but I didn't photograph the process.

The next photo is the equivalent of when Julia Child would put a cake into her oven and pull out a finished cake out of the oven below.

I trimmed the base velvet close to the lettering because I wanted the letters to read as LOUD.

I bordered the atara with the same ribbon that edges the stripes. I used two different shades of turquoise embroidery thread to decorate and attach the atara to the tallit.

You can see that the colors of the letters shift across the atara. You can also see a couple of stray threads that are now no longer present.

Here is the atara on the tallit.

I even made a bag.

The quilted faux-suede is a Marc Jacobs fabric that has been in my stash for years. It was originally a fabric that was selling for mucho dinero. I fell in love with it and waited until it went on sale before I snatched up a bunch of it.

The hand-dyed stip is leftover from the making of this tallit.

This is the reverse of the bag

Later this week we tie the tzitzit on Zoom.

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מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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