sarah in nyc

 When I last posted I was hopeful but unsure if I would be able to finish the Atara for Liat's tallit. I began embroidering the letters on Friday and started up again right after Havdalah. I finished the last bits of embroidery on Sunday. With the embroidery completed, I had to remove the cotton that was marked with the lettering. The cotton fabric gets removed thread by thread. Tewing catalogs are filled with specialized tools for many different sorts of sewing tasks. Below is the best task for the job. As I worked I thought about all of the many folktales in many different traditions that all have the hero working away at a giant task until it is completed.  I wasn't Hercules cleaning out the Royal stables but this took patience. If I had unlimited time I would have perhaps filled in the letters with embroidery. I didn't have unlimited time. I wanted the colors to have the same chromatic shift as the tallit stripes. I decided to fill in the lettering with oil paint sticks...

 Normally I will post about a piece as I am working away on it.  as many of you are learning Covid is a real energy suck. I could have either worked on Liat's tallit or I could have blogged about it. I was unable to do both. I could delay writing a blog post but the bat-mitzvah wasn't going to wait for me to get better. So I chose to work even in my diminished state. Covid did make lots of the tasks involved in making this tallit take much longer than normal. Case in point, the pinot or corner pieces. Under normal circumstances, they would have been completed in a day.  With Covid, the task took five days.  As of this minute, the tallit itself is completed. Some of my sewing buddies detest sewing for others and never do it. Some of them find working with a client to be an entirely unpleasant experience. As I look at this tallit I love it because I never in a million years would have envisioned the sight of the sounds at Mount Sinai to be the color spectrum. How freak...

  I am making progress on Liat's tallit. Each dyed strip needs to be edged with the dark teal ribbon before being attached to the body of the tallit. I am really happy with the progress although I have had to do a fair amount of un-stitching along the way. Either I have gotten better at the less than pleasant job of undoing rows of machine embroidery or have achieved a new state of Zen but I haven't cursed once when I have had to undo dense machine embroidery. Yesterday we took the train to have lunch with my husband's friend since second grade. Aside from the lovely time we had and the excellent lunch we ate I also got to take these photos of the fabulous light fixtures at  Grand Central Terminal.  Today I opened my front door and found a bag attached to the doorknob.  Inside was a treasure trove, from my friend Pearl. Pearl's adventurous mother had traveled the world before she decided to get married. Pearl's mother was an accomplished needlewoman ( she knit the b...