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.