Back at Judith's tallit

I know that often my posts are something of a crazy quilt of topics. I do try to keep the scope of topics a little bit focused so I don't sound completely deranged. However despite working on Judith's Tallit for the past many weeks I have often neglected to post about my progress.

I don't expect any of you to memorize each and every post so a quick recap. Judith needs a replacement for a tallit that I had made for her a bunch of years ago.

The old tallit was made out of silk noil. Noil takes dyes beautifully but isn't a particularly strong silk. I was charged with making Judith a new tallit out of stronger silk matka.

Judith chose the silk for the tallit form the website of one of my favorite place to purchase silk matka. Unfortunately each of the silks arrived a slightly different green than depicted on screen.

I couldn't use the silks as is and have been working on creating a pleasant conversation between the colors that really didn't want to be in the same room together.

Block printing has been my major tool to create a nice conversation between the colors.

The time had come to start assembling the stripes. One issue I have is how to manage the raw edges of the silk on the stripes. Hems will create too much bulk and will prevent the tallit from properly draping. Covering the raw edges with ribbon will create a drapier tallit.

Prepare yourself for a small digression.

When my older son was five my mother asked him what he wanted for a Chanukah gift. My son asked for a set of Power Ranger earmuffs.We all could invision exactly what he wanted. A set of earmuffs with a Jason head covering each ear.

We all knew what Power Ranger earmuffs would look like. It seemed like such a completely obvious product.We all assumed that we had seen them somewhere. Except....they didn't exist outside of our own minds.

So in our family an object that obviously should exist but doesn't is called Power Ranger Earmuffs.

So in assembling Judith's tallit I needed green ribbon that fell into the Power Ranger Earmuffs category. I needed ribbon with variegated color.

Rather than spending hours trying to source something that I was pretty sure didn't exist, I decided to make my own. I had a spool of white satin ribbon. I don't know what sort of videos show up on your facebook feed but I get a whole lot of crafting videos. Among the videos that have been on my feed lately show people using a fork to spiral up a t-shirt and then dyeing the raised ridges. You end up with a very fancy looking spiral tie dye.

Anyway, I like the idea of dyeing the edges to create a cool effect.

I painted the top and the bottom of the satin ribbon spool with watered down dyes in a range of green adjacent colors.

I left the spool to dry overnight.

Natural wicking spread the color deeper into the spool.

After ironing to set the color I had what I needed,

a variegated green ribbon.

I stitched it onto the stripe that I had created using the dark olive silk and a strip of silk that I had dyed.

Using an embroidery stitch in yet another shade of green adds just the right touch.

Here you see the assembled stripe both with and without the hand dyed ribbon.The ribbon pulls it all together.

Now you see the assembled stripe atop the green tallit base.

I'm really happy that this works.

So now that one set of stripes is completed it is time to get working on the others.

The seafoam green silk has been improved by a couple of rounds of block printing. I plan to edge this strip with dark green ribbon that will be machine embroidered into place.

Each element of this tallit is a puzzle that needs to be solved.

Shabbat Shalom!

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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