Busy, busy, busy

 Jess's tallit  

Is heading towards the finish line.

The pinot/corner pieces will be made out of woven strips of the ribbon that I embroidered both for Jess's tallit as well as for other recent tallitot.

I wove the strips together last night over a bit of fusible interfacing.

Eventually, it looked  like this.

You are getting some additional photos just because I am feeling really pleased with myself.

All of this sewing is being interspersed with holiday cooking. The tzimmes tat was cooked in this graniteware roasting pan is now in the freezer. not visible is the 7.5 lbs. of flanken meat that are under the vegetables.

I am feeling especially fond of this pan because it has been working hard all week. Not pictured is the brisket that I cooked in there yesterday. Both the tzimmes and the beef are now frozen.

Today I used the same roasting pan to sweat the leaves off of two heads of cabbage.

Yes, there is stuffed cabbage making in my future. And of course the cabbage will be cooked in that same roasting pan.

For the last few days I have been going back and forth from sewing to cooking. I serged the woven ribbons into the basic rectangles for the pinot and there is some hand embroidery that I am finishing up on the tallit.

And now, a slight change of topic.

I had purchased the lavender floral fabric pictured above because it was on sale at Fabric Mart. For reasons I no longer remember I had only purchased a yard. I hadn't read the fabric description quite well enough and instead of being a smooth lightweight knit it was a heavy double knit. If you are keeping track, we are now up to two errors.

I cut out the dress and sewed it up and it was too short even using up every inch of length. OK that's three errors. I pulled the dress out of my fabric stash a little while ago and reevaluated how much of a disaster I was facing in the dress. I didn't have any lavender fabric to use as a ruffle to add a bit of length to the dress. I did have a bit of a purplish brown thin knit that I had used in a garment that was a complete and unsalvageable failure. I added circular ruffles to the hem cut from the completely failed garment. My older sewing books recommend that if you add a new print or color to a garment in one place you need to add it elsewhere so it doesn't look like a big fat mistake. So, a bit of that brownish knit binds the neckline. It isn't a great match, but as they say, "good enough for government work".

So there it is, a dress that was born out of a series of errors.

It's time to get back to Jess's tallit.