Madeline's tallit and a whole lot of other stuff

 Although there are times that my readers may feel like my brain is as scattered as a bird's, I do try to write somewhat coherently. Times like this when I haven't been posting as often as I would like (Passover and the flood just took up too much room) topics start stacking up like the chocolates on Lucy's conveyor belt. I will try to do my best to not get too overwhelmed and produce the blog equivalent of Lucy madly stuffing those chocolates into her mouth.

I actually began fitting in snippets of time to work on Madeline's tallit.

I drafted the letters on paper and then traced them onto sheer cotton batiste. I marked out 2 1/2 inch squares on the cotton using a ruler. I pinned the drafted letters onto a bit of ivory woo/mink coating and satin stitched the letters using some blue silk. 

The mink fibers in the wool has been spun into yarn along with regular lamb's wool. The result is really soft and cushy.The silk came from a reel that I purchased when the Scalamandre factory in Queens was closing. I split each strand into three so  because using the full strand was just too heavy looking.

My plan was to layer the marked cotton over the wool and when the embroidery was done to tear away all of. the cotton.

I thought that the lettering would look better outlined in black.

The black silk thread I used for the outline has a perfectly boring provenance.I won't bore you with the not very interesting details of that purchase.

The next thing I had to do was find the footprints of each of the animals referenced in the  text.

יְהוּדָה בֶן תֵּימָא אוֹמֵר, הֱוֵי עַז כַּנָּמֵר, וְקַל כַּנֶּשֶׁר, וְרָץ כַּצְּבִי, וְגִבּוֹר כָּאֲרִי, לַעֲשׂוֹת רְצוֹן אָבִיךָ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמָיִם.

Judah ben Tema said: Be strong as a leopard, and swift as an eagle, and fleet as a gazelle, and brave as a lion, to do the will of your Father who is in heaven. 

Google helped me find all of the correct foot prints. I discovered that my phone made an excellent light table.

Those are eagle foot prints. I traced the design in pencil and then darkened it with a Sharpie.

I basted the foot prints into place and then embroidered them in the black silk.

If the embroidered footprint needs an extra stitch or two I can always add it later on.

At one point I had stupidly embroidered two layers of wool together and had to unpick.

Earlier today my lap looked like this

because I was unpicking all of the white cotton . I'm not going to show you the completed but un edged pinot yet, mostly because I just realized that I still haven't taken photos of them. That will have to wait for another post.

So now I am going to turn to the nostalgia portion of this post. The nostalgia comes in two different forms.  

Back in the 1980s Georgio Armani was the bees knees. Even in consignment stores his clothing was sold at a premium because his slouchy luxe look was just so new, so quietly outrageous.

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The other day in the thrift store I saw a lovely Armani jacket for not very much money at all. The beautiful slouchy wide shouldered look is just not desired at the moment. I looked at the jacket and tought about how the mighty had fallen and kept working my way down the rack. 

Over in the coats I found this...

A big wide shouldered slouchy coat in waxed cotton.  I would have drooled over this coat in 1984. I then saw the labels.

Another Armani and it had been made exclusively made for Charivari the chicest boutique in New York during the 80's and 90's. They had wonderful outrageous clothes from newly emerging designers. I didn't have the money to shop but I used to visit and admire. I wasn't brave enough or confidant enough to wear the clothes. But each visit just exploded my brains. Sadly the store is no more.

So now for the other bit of nostalgia.  Naami is the daughter of a colleague of my father's.  Naami's father was a big cheese in the world of Conservative  Judaism. My father was a small cheese. My father was important to his congregants and had a nice reputation in Boston but he wasn't a  BIG CHEESE.  I would see Naami's parents year after year at the annual rabbi convention. 

Naami's father has a work colleague who was a dear friend of my parents so I heard about Naami and her siblings and the fabulous things that they were up to my whole life--but we only met as adults.

A few years ago Naami who mostly lives in Israel asked me to restore the tallit that her mom had purchased as a gift in honor of Naami's graduating from rabbinical school. The main body of the tallit had shredded away.

My task was to transfer the large appliques onto new silk. I did. Twice. Because the original silk we had selected was far too heavy.

Anyway...I completed the job. I emailed naami and my emails kept bouncing back. 

I figured that at some point Naami would come back.  It took a while, but Friday Naami and her husband came by to pick up the tallit.

We talked about our parents and our children. We talked about beloved relatives who are no longer living. 

It meant so much that a gift from a mother who hasn't been alive for many years is now functional and useable and wrapping up her daughter in the "light of the tzitzit" and in the light of her love.

Once when my youngest was little we were walking home along Broadway and he commented that we lived in a jungle.  I didn't think that he meant "the concrete jungle" because he wasn't yet in kindergarten. So I asked my son what he meant. She said, "Well there are so many trees here. It must be the jungle."

I may have tried to disabuse him of the idea but I have never looked at the trees on Broadway the same way again.

I took these photos along our little bit of the jungle

last week as the leaves 

were still small 

 and that wonderful impossibly bright green that they are

at the very beginning 

of spring.