A work vacation

 My husband has a friend whose grandmother lived in Brooklyn. During the summers rather than going on an actual vacation she would sleep in a different bedroom for a couple of months.

I have taken a similar work vacation. I am taking a break from the Schechter Mappah and going back to work on Alan's tallit. 

 I had calligraphed eight verses of Psalm 146, twice for two of the stripe panels earlier in the summer.

It was time to tackle the other two renditions of Psalm 146.

The white acrylic paint has a weirdly dry texture. 

Eventually all four text stripe panels were completed.

My goal in this tallit is to make it look like a standard issue tallit from a distance. I began stitching straight lines of black straight stitches starting from the outer edges of the tallit. Each row of stitching is a presser foot apart from the one next to it.

I then added a black ribbon with a zig zag stitch.

Here is the reverse of the  tallit.

Unlike a garment, both the right side and the wrong side of the tallit are visible. they both have to look cute. I covered the reverse of the black ribbon with a checkerboard stitch.

Clearly there is much more stitching to be done.

The view from the sewing machine

I think that you can now see where I am going with this tallit

Today I took a break---another vacation! Well, actually I got to work on the atara. I calligraphed the text onto the reverse of the Grateful Dead fabric, basted it onto the black wool and then began embroidering the letters.

It would be a lie if I told you that I knew immediately that embroidering a buttonhole stitch around the letters was the right way to go. To be honest, it took four tries, four different stitches until i realized that this was the right way to go.

The embroidery doesn't take forever.

When I am done with the embroidery

I will pull away the white flannel thread by thread.

Tick tick tick, my deadlines are ticking away.