sarah in nyc

 Any of you who are familiar with Where the Wild Things Are  will be familiar with the phrase  In and out of weeks and through a year, that described Max's adventure in the land of the wild things. Nini sent me the key photos from her last summer's trip to Nova Scotia just about a year ago. I began by looking and looking at these photos and trying to figure out how to render this particular landscape in fabric.   While sometimes Nova Scotia has bright sunny skies.  So often, it is the fog that defines the place. I remembered walking with my Halifax born friend Shawna on a misty day towards the Hudson River.  It was a misty cool day. We were essentially walking through the fog. Shawna sighed and said, "Ahh, it's Halifax weather!".   The fabric for the main body of the tallit was chosen because it evokes the fog. I added more fog with oil paint sticks and with hand embroidery. This photo inspired the stripe of pines above the fog. Nini wanted to be ...

 Now that Passover has been put away I can give my attention to Nini's Nova Scotia inspired tallit. The tallit is inspired by Nini's sense of the divine when she is "back home" in Nova Scotia. These beautiful photos are Nini's. A Nova Scotia weaver created this tartan to celebrate her home province in the 1950s. I wore skirts in this tartan from infanthood through my college years. The colors in this plaid are OF the place. Nini wanted to include the tartan in her tallit. The other day I bound the edges of the pine tree stripes with the Nova Scotia tartan. I love how the bit of yellow silk thread in the trees picks up the yellow stripe in the tartan. Since I took these photos I have spent the time to pull the loose threads to the back.  When I design a piece I have IDEAS, and to see them come together as I had imagined is just a joy. Here are the trees  placed just above the stencilled and embroidered fog. I know where the journey of this tallit to end up but I do...

 While I have been working on Miles' tallit I have been trying to work out elements of Nini's tallit in my head at the same time. Nini's tallit will be evoking Nova Scotia. I have been stitching away  at the fog. I have been adding some stitching with silver metallic thread  to get  that sense of fog. One side of the tallit is nearly done and the other half is about halfway there. But often when I work on one part of a piece I am problem solving about the next bit of work that I need to tackle. That next bit of work is how to create the trees. These beautiful photos are nini's and she sent them to me so I could understand what exactly she was thinking of in the Nova Scotia landscape. My first memory of Nova Scotia was being driven from the airport to Halifax when I was five. Pine trees were part of my life in Massachusetts but the tall spindly looming pine trees that lined those roads were something else entirely. I have been thinking about how to create those trees ...