sarah in nyc

All ten kippot are done. Amazon.com Widgets Those of you who care about zero waste cutting will be happy to know that nearly every inch of Grandpa's tallit was used in making these kippot. A friend from one of my sewing lists talks about inchage of fabric  (as opposed to yardage). There were a few small odd arches of fabric left, but my calculations were right, ten kippot was all that could be made out of the tallit. No two are identical. Each is trimmed a bit differently. I made good use of some of the vintage ribbon and metallic yarns and threads in my stash. Each kippah is tipped with a button at the top, again vintage buttons pulled from my stash. This project has used parts of my brain that I tend not to use very often. I hadn't expected to enjoy the kippah making quite as much as I did. Sometimes it is interesting to work within very narrow parameters.

When a beloved grandfather is no longer alive having a bit of his presence at a grandchild's bar-mitzvah can be a really important thing.As I mentioned in my last post, there is one grandfather and nice grandchildren. My clients suggested that I make kippot for the rest of the grandchildren out of the tallit. If you go to a synagogue there are usually baskets of kippot at the door. many people when they plan a bar mitzvah will also get kippot made.those kippot usually cost a couple of bucks. I knew that if I made kippot out of Grandpa's tallit  I couldn't just charge a couple of bucks. I don't have a factory set up. Each piece would need to be not stamped out by machine, but hand cut and hand pieced together. I knew I had to charge an actual significant amount of money for each kippah.  I found a place on line that will make kippot out of fabrics that you provide for a relatively small amount of money. I suggested that my client call and see if they could mak...

One of the things that I am really proud of is I have a reputation for taking on projects that are sort of out of the box.  Amazon.com Widgets The woman who asked me to take on the  kittle project  realized part of the way through our initial meeting that perhaps I might be able to help out with some projects for her son's upcoming bar mitzvah. The bar-mitzvah boy's grandfather died right around the time the boy was born. The bar-mitzvah boy was named for this grandfather. My client and her husband wondered if I could turn somehow add something of Grandpa's tallit to the tallit they had already purchased. Clearly it is easier to integrate a treasured textile if that textile is part of the design process from the beginning. Never the less I was ready to think about how to think about this problem. The coloring of the new tallit is intense, a midnight blue and peacock green. There was also the issue of how to share bits of the tallit with the other 8 grandchildr...