COLOR!!!

 The nice thing about working away at something is that eventually---there is progress.

Over the past many days I have been constructing stripes.

As I work on building each stripe my goal is to have each stripe beautiful on it's own as well as working as part of the whole composition that will be the tallit.

Sometimes when people ask about my work they ask me about the techniques that I usein creating a tallit. I always tell them that I am not married to technique. I can dye or embroider or piece or use any number of other methods. 

Right now I love the two layers of block printing on these two stripes.

The other day I began assembling the tallit.

I construct the tallit on both the right and the wrong side--because the tallit is flipped back over thew shoulders. I start placing the stripes from the bottom of the tallit and work my way up. I stitched the bottom lines of metallit stitching by using a guide line on my sewing machine. All of the other elements are spaced a pressure foot away from that first stitching line.  I suppose that I could mark out that first line...but why bother when my sewing machine gives me a tool that saves me time. There probably are a couple of wobbles in that initial line but I promise that they won't be noticeable.

Constructing the tallit is a bit like playing with those three dimensional tic-tac-toe games from my childhood. You build the design simultaneously from the top and the bottom. It took me a long time to figure out how to do this...but now it is second nature.

My husband was a little worried about the color of this tallit. Today he declared that it really did look like a tallit.

I just love all of these greens together. 

Many of my tallitot reference the sky and the ocean.

This tallit evokes a lake to me. 

Continuing on this theme of intensity of color--the other night we went to visit our friends Alfie and Judy who live in Riverdale in an apartment that faces west.

I had trouble following the conversation as I watched the sunset.