Pivoting

 Many years ago, I worked with a woman who had an idea about how to embellish t-shirts for women and embellish them and sell them.  My co-worker drew quite beautifully. One afternoon after work she went downtown to find shirts to embellish and she didn't find exactly  the shirt that she had in mind and she never pursued the project any further. 

I was completely baffled. I couldn't understand how a slightly different shirt couldn't be used instead of the shirt she had originally envisioned. I have thought of that woman often over the decades and how for her, a small alteration of expectations just completely shut her down.

So much of my work is about facing an obstacle and then pivoting---like a Roomba.

I was about to start the atara for Terry's tallit. For those of you who have lives outside of reading my blog, here is a photo of Terry's tallit.

It is made out of chunks of the tablecloth that Terry's mom embroidered for Terry's 20th birthday.  Terry's mother died a couple of months ago.

Terry's mother wasn't religious but the one biblical verse she loved was

אֶשָּׂא עֵינַי אֶל הֶהָרִים מֵאַיִן יָבֹא עֶזְרִי

I lift up my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come?

After giving the matter some thought I decided that the best way to get the text onto the atara was to cut a stencil and to add color using oil paint sticks. 

Here is the stencil after being cut out and used. I used a heavy weight drawing paper and not Bristol board for the stencil because that pad was easier to reach. Normally a stencil that isn't getting super hard usage doesn't have to be cut out of the perfect material.  But if you look closely, the stencil broke in a couple of places which wasn't a disaster. 

The lettering needed to be outlined to stand out a bit more. Normally I would have used black acrylic paint or fabric paint. I have many tubes and bottles of paint but alas no black. I did have a black oil paint stick. I figured that I could carefully outline the letters with a fine tipped brush.  That was going pretty well...until my hand landed on some oil paint stick crumbs that I inadvertently rubbed into the white linen. You can see the cleaned up blob under the big aleph. It looks much better in the photo than in real life.

I clicked through possible solutions to the problem of the black blobs, maybe I would paint in the mountains? Maybe I could make ecru paint and calligraph the letters?

I felt very proud of my self as I mixed up ecru paint out of a seemingly random collection of colors.

I painted the letters onto the linen.

Ehhh. I wasn't thrilled with the results. I much preferred the sharp edged letters I had made with the stencil.

I based the blobby linen to clean linen and 

spent the rest of the day embroidering over the pretty letters.

As I finish each word I pull away the blobbed on linen thread by thread. When I am done all of the letters will be embroidered and the stained linen will be gone.

I am as of now, most of the way done. If these disasters had taken place thirty years ago I probably would have needed to take a day to be depressed and have a moment of self loathing before I could proceed  (How could you be so stupid!!!)

Now after more than thirty years of doing this work, and more than thirty years of sewing disasters of one kind or another I just pivot and turn to the next possible solution.

I am now going to change the topic---a warning to those of you who don't live inside of my brain. 

I rarely dream. If I do dream I have truly boring dreams that are exactly about what I am working through in my head. Before Passover I will have a dream about cooking for Passover. There isn't a shred of symbolism in my dreams. 

Last light I had a dream that I was ill and in the hospital. ( I was feeling a bit under the weather last night, thanks for worrying --it isn't Covid). In my dream I walked out of my room and my college friend Donna who died this past winter from glioblastoma and Donna was visiting me in a lounge. She looked terrific. My doctor turned to me and asked me what was wrong with Donna. I explained that she had had a glioblastoma but clearly had beaten it--because didn't she look wonderful? My doctor shook his head. I woke up .

When I told my husband about my dream I began to cry. Donna and I hadn't seen one another very often since college. But in the last several years we wrote to one another fairly often. I loved the deep honesty of our written conversations. 

I realize that the loss of Donna and the loss of my friend Miriam a few months later both two truth tellers, truth checkers of my youth has been hard. I guess bearing these losses is also part of growing older.