sarah in nyc

 For reasons that I don't understand, the work that I do comes in waves. there were years when most of my work was making chuppot,  wedding canpopies. Other years are filled with making nothing but challah covers or tallitot. This has been a year of mending.  There have been many, many mending projects that I have worked on over the past several months.  Several months ago my shul buddy Chris asked me if I would take on the task of mending his wedding tallit.  Chris and his wife are celebrating a big anniversary later this month. I love that Chris loves his wife so much, loves his marriage so much that it really mattered to him that his wedding tallit be fixed. The tallit was made by a sweet woman who was sort of a wild and wooly craft person. She painted Chris's tallit on China silk. China silk is a very pretty, inexpensive and fragile silk that shreds if  you sneeze.  Making a tallit out of China silk (this isn't just silk woven in China but a type o...

 Our windows were washed just before the scaffolding that had surrounded our building came down earlier this year. The forest fires in Canada have caused our windows to look like this. It may make sense to clean them after fire season comes to an end or before my widows just get too depressing. I am not going to think TOO hard about what that gunk is doing to my lungs. I have been working away at mending Chris's tallit. Each time I think I am done repairing the silk another broken bit appears. I  assumed that the gold gutta (the gold colored paste used to keep the silk paint colors from flowing into one another ) was damaged but it had also damaged the silk. I had to suture the tan painted silk to the turquoise and then chain stitch over the whole thing. The artist who made this tallit made two eyelets in each corner for the tzitzit. She looped the tzitzit through the two eyelets.  I don't think that the two holes are actually halachically OK and I have to do a bit of thi...