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.

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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