really and truly done

 I had promised Jess that her tallit would be wearable by Rosh Hashanah. It was.  The atara though, was not yet completed.

I worked on hand embroidering the letters through a nasty head cold.

I used hand dyed silk embroidery threads. I used them because they evoked the colors in the watercolors that Jess's late mother had used in her beautiful sketch books filled with little watercolor landscapes, color studies, poetry, and reflections on what she was seeing and thinking. This seemed like a lovely way to include Jess's mother who had died completely unexpectedly not long ago.

Once I was done with the embroidery I backed the atara with two pieces of crisp drapery fabric to give it just the right amount of body. I cut the atara to size and rough edged the three layers with my serger.

Then it was time to create a binding.

I embroidered one edge of this beautiful blue and white striped satin ribbon with a teal scallop stitch. I planned to fold the ribbon along the dark blue center stripe the scallop would shop on the front of the atara and the unstitched side would be unseen, behind the atara.

I pinned the embroidered ribbon in place with one of my new favorite tools, these plastic mini-clips.

Most old sewing books tell you to pin things in place for sewing using straight pins. I detest using straight pins. No matter how careful i am I get stabbed when using them. AND I always loose one or two that will always end up in the bottom of one of my feet. using the clips helps keep my sewing tidier. For a while such clips were insanely expensive and now they are not.

And of course I used decorative stiches to sew the binding to the atara.

Yup, you will have to wade through many photos of the tallit with the atara.

I am just so please with this tallit. 

More importantly, so was Jess. I with that I could bottle the expression on her face as she tried her tallit on this morning so I could take it out any time I had any self doubt about my work.

In addition to finishing off this tallit, I also made Shabbat dinner. Well at this writing, most of it is done. The chicken soup is simmering away in the slow cooker. The chicken (roasted with ras-al-hanout)

will be put into a warm oven just before I light candles and the cauliflower that will be turned into a puree, known in these parts as "blobbo-taters" is awaiting flavoring and pureeing. dessert is just blackberries.

I leave you with this incredibly silly parodic song  'A Romance to a Cow".  Sorry, this is a bonus bit of joy for those of you with good Hebrew. If you don't know Hebrew it is a charming melody performed well.

And the next song always makes me a little weepy.

Shabbat Shalom.