At long last... the tallit is done

 This tallit had some drama because the colors Judith and I had ordered looked completely different in person than they did on my monitor. What had looked lovely on screen looked just plain terrible in real life. I had realized that if I block printed over the colors that hated one another I could have all of the colors get along.

I had some other questions/worries but Judith reassured me and told me that she completely trusted me. I was grateful for that trust that because I was no longer paralyzed with worry and I could just work problem solving as I saw fit.

I have been working on this tallit for the past couple of months but I haven't been posting about it a whole lot. 

I also dyed some strips of raw silk to work with the three colors that weren't getting along.

I hand embroidered the atara

and edged it with two rows of gold braid over forest green petersham ribbon.

The pinot/corner pieces are made of more of the seafoam green silk that I had block printed and edged with the same forest green ribbon and lots of machine embroidery.

Here the completed pinot are waiting to be sewn into place.

And here is one corner piece sewn in place.I love how the rows of stitching dance together.

Yesterday, I finished the tallit.

I dyed the pale green ribbon

I also made a bag for the tallit using offcuts from both this tallit project and ribbons that I had embroidered for other tallitot.

Amazingly, I even had the perfect forest green lining for the bag. I have probably had it in my stash for twenty years. It appeared in a Fabric Mart Mystery Bundle.

Early in my working on this project my husband was worried because green is such a non traditional color for a tallit. During these last stages he kept remarking that although the color isn't traditional, this is so unmistakably a tallit.

We so often evoke the sky in our tallitot. The techelet--the blue in the tzitzit and the stripes is there to evoke the blue of the heavens. There is a bit of rabbinical exegesis in the creation story.

The word שמים/sky, is a pun of sorts and is really שם/ there  is מים/water. This tallit, for me, evokes the water that is within the sky in this old Jewish  understanding of the universe.