Work sewing and recreational sewing

I was asked during Pesach to make a tallit for someone I have known for my entire life. It is a gift and a surprise for the recipient. I was asked if I had any tallitot ready to go in my stash.

When I first started doing this work my sewing skills were rudimentary. I used to buy scarf blanks, paint them and create pinot/corner pieces. I slowly stopped doing the ready-to wear tallitot and have only done custom tallitot for the past many years.

I did go through an old box (because the person who made this request is a dear, dear friend) and I found a velvet shawl that I had begun to paint. I added some more color and set all of the dyes. If you had assumed that fabric paint painted on a shawl 15 years ago and not set is 100% permanent --you would be wrong.

We had some discussion back and forth about the right verse s to use on this tallit but further digging in my stash turned up a remnant I had purchased at B+J Fabrics at some point in the 1990s.

It is silk brocade and the original price of the fabric was well over $100/yard. It may have been over $200. this piece of brocade that I have pulled out and admired but not used for all of these years was the perfect match for the tallit. One of the reasons that I hadn't used it is that it took a while for my sewing skills to catch up to my love of beautiful fabrics.

One of the things that makes brocades so beautiful are the long floats of threads across the face of the fabric. those thread floats are beautiful but the cut edge of the fabric can unravel if you sneeze too hard.

As you can see I fused all of the pieces that I had cut. I don't have photos of the edge stitching I had to do as extra insurance.

The I had to construct the pinot and the atara.

This gold braid was perfect to edge the atara but was too large in scale for the pinot.

I embroidered navy blue grosgrain ribbon with a dark purple scallop and then couched a heavy gold yarn to the edge of the ribbon to REALLY frame the brocade.

Yesterday I assembled the tallit.

I finished tying the tzitzit a few minutes ago

Earlier today I mended a tablecloth.

The hole was a rough rectangle. I added a patch behind the hole. One of the nice thing about owning so many old tablecloths is that I have been able to see so many mending methods used all all of these cloths. this is the first time I have used this method successfully. Sometimes I have to read directions about a thousand times and then mull them over for a couple of decades before my hands and my brain can master the task.

Last week I finally finished the bathrobe I had begun before Passover.

The Grateful Dead themed flannel was a gift from my youngest ( the fabric was in the give-away bin at his work). This robe is based on my previous robe which was inspired by a 1940's design for a child's robe from a Frances Blondin book. There is a set of internal ties in addition to the external ones. There are any number of ways I could have engineered the closures for this robe. I did what seemed simplest at the moment. I reserve the option to change any element of this robe at any time.

I thought about directions for a simple collar I had seen on a YouTube video. Of course as soon as I made a flannel robe it got too warm to wear a flannel robe. If you want a diagram so you can make a similar robe just let me know in the comments.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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