Seven days of Ten

 If any of you are on Facebook you may have noticed the Ten-Day Artists' Challenge. Where someone nominates you and then you post a piece of your artwork every day for ten days with no commentary and each day you nominate another artist to post their work.

I am usually terrible at this sort of a thing. I have failed to send out each and every chain letter than has been sent my way since the first one I got from Robin Schwartz in elementary school. I may have hung in for part of an email recipe challenge from a dozen or so years ago but got exhausted by it very quickly ( actually as I type this I remember that I didn't get any recipes from that one).

Despite not fulfilling any of the chain letters that have come my way neither dire fate nor great riches have come my way by way of the chain letters---But I have been doing the Ten-Day Artists Challenge.

I have been posting older pieces. I will post the images here, and because I can ( this is my blog and I make the rules) I will comment about each piece.

This is a candle lighting techina made to be a wallhanging to hang behind your Shabbat candles.

 I made this piece without a particular client in mind

I constructed this bag to hold a chuppah. The chuppah itself was made out of a vintage family table cloth on which I had embroidered text from the wedding ceremony. The bag itself is constructed out of ribbons. Unfortunately, the marriage didn't last. I really liked the bride and I hope that she has found someone who will be a better fit for her.

I have been doing a series of challah covers based on zemirot  for the past many years. I like the mix of materials here, a jacquard woven linen in the center and two different silk shantungs as the borders. I went a little wild with the painted vine motif.

My client wanted me to turn this lovely hand-woven green wool shawl into a tallit. I was fortunate to have a bit of orange wool in exactly the right shade for the pinot. The machine embroidery stitches on the pinot echo the woven design. This was a small but very satisfying job.

On paper, the colors used in this tallit ought not to work at all. We were all taught in elementary school that using more than one red in a piece clashes.  You can amuse yourself by counting all of the reds---and they are all harmonious. I loved working on this piece.

This challah cover was a wedding gift for my cousin and his lovely wife. It is more feminine than my usual work. I love this couple so they got hand-embroidered letters.

This tallit was made for a pistol of a bat-mitzvah girl. Her Torah portion included the Song of the Sea. I layered the silks, some commercially dyed and some dyed by me, and stitched the waves freehand. I then cut away layer of the silk and finally satin stitched over all of the raw edges. 

So this brings us up through seven days of the challenge. It has actually been nice to re-visit some of these older pieces.

We are changing the house over to Passover mode after Shabbat. Most years I have trouble eating down all of the chametz before Passover.  We managed to have very little chametz left for us to eat through tomorrow.

We are eating 

spicy salmon breaded with wheat germ because I had to use it up. I also made to little latkes made out of the left over breading mixed with egg. 

We are also having a big salad that isn't yet made. Our youngest stopped by to help out this afternoon and I had hardly a thing to feed him.

To get you into Passover mode---here is our maror.

It is really impressive.

I am hoping that keeping it in water will make it extra pungent.

Shabbat Shalom!