sarah in nyc

Isabel’s tallit is complete. We just have to schedule the tzitzit tying. I am pretty delighted with this piece.   The atara came out exactly as I had hoped. You can see much of it before it was sewn onto the tallit And here it is on the tallit.   I could not be more pleased. I did more work on Yoni’s tallit.I found a spool of army green thread and realized that rows of machine embroidery in the army green would be perfect. Things were going so well that I decided to add a decorative stitch to the edge of the  rock stripes. I forgot how the stitching will stiffen up the edge of the stripe in a really unpleasant way. I had of course chosen a stitch that was fairly dense.   I had a crazy amount of unpicking to do. Unpicking stitches is probably one of my least favorite activities. I would rather clean toilets. If there were a way to NOT unpick the stitching, I would have done it. Eventually, after several episodes of crappy re...

Most tallitot begin with taking the first cut into  a piece of silk. This one is no exception. I had to do the usual cut and pull a thread to help me cut a straight line along 72 inches of slippery silk. Either I have gotten better at this, or this heavy weight silk just makes the job easier but after 72 inches I wasn’t a bit cranky. My eyes didn’t even ache.   Today I began the first layer of dyeing.   The color will be far less spectacular once the silk dries. The speckles are caused by large grains of salt. You can buy a teeny jar from the silk dye company marked “silk salt” but any large grained salt will do just fine. The larger the grain the more pronounced the design.   I have used everything from regular table salt to large sugar crystals or even uncooked rice. They all work.   I find that layers of thin dyes built up create a visually exciting surface with real depth of color. I hate colors right out of the jar. I hate looking at...