sarah in nyc

 The Schechter Mappah is complete!!! This is the view that the people leading services will have of the piece--- a gateway into the experience of prayer. The Torah readers will view the mappah this way. Tucked beneath the edge of the mappah are the blessings for the Torah. On the other side of that piece is the misheberach for the ill in the community. The other text panels  also flip. Here is the introductory text for the weekday Torah reading. "Turn the page", and you have the introduction for Shabbat. The text panel on the other side of the mappah has the half kaddish on one side and the text that you recite right afterwards, as the Torah is lifted, on the other side. Officially this was a restoration job. I would say that probably 80% of what you see here is new and reconstructed. The blue wool sky with hand embroidered clouds replaced the hopelessly stained  hand dyed and hand embroidered white wool sky that had been there previously.  The striped silk "masonry...

 As many of you know, I am a self taught sewer.  Well, let me clarify that. I learned how to sew from obsessive reading of Threads Magazine back in the years when it was truly a creative source for people who worked with textiles, from sewing books, from the incredibly generous online sewing community and from my own many, many failures. In my earlier years sewing I used to think that underpinnings like interfacing and underlining were essentially dishonest.  What I have learned over the years is that rather than functioning as a fabric fib, interfacing and backing fragile fabrics with sturdier ones can extend the functional life of fabric. So as I re-construct the Schechter Mappah I keep figuring out way to make the piece last a long long time into the future. This time around, I have backed all of the silk that is being used in the "masonry" with the lovely Grateful Dead flannel that my son gave me. The flannel gives the silk a heftier, richer hand and hopefully will ke...

  The time had come for me to re-do what I had thought of as the gateway into prayer on the Schechter Mappah. The silk had shredded away so rather than make that same mistake again I decided to remake the doorway in Ultrasuede. I cut a piece of tan Ultrasuede to size and then painted it with a mixture of fabric dyes and acrylic paint. I wanted to add a bit more texture to the Ultrasuede before I added the text. I used a vintage rubber stamp to create the texture. I used a blend of soft purples, blues and greens on the stamp. It was time to calligraph the text. Perhaps I ought to have actually looked at the existing text. Instead I relied on my memory and the ear-worm that has been hanging around as i have been thinking about doing this part of the mappah. The relevant track is the first one that you will hear on this album, but feel free to dive into the sounds of my childhood and listen to this album to the end. I chalked out a border, using the width of my palm (about three inche...

  Eight verses of Psalm 146 are now painted on one strip of wool for Alan's tallit. The letters will need another layer of paint and an outline to cute the lettering up a little bit. I will probably be painting this text out a few more times before this task is completed but it feels like a good start. I have discovered, that it is for some reason, easier to copy the text from my phone than from a book. I love this mix of high tech and low tech  to complete a task. As always I am the most efficient as a worker when I have several tasks on my plate at one time so I can hop from one task to another when I get stuck. Otherwise I can just wallow in my failures and not get anything done. So, the other task on my plate is the Schechter Mappah. Yesterday I finished edging the sky. Three rows of rat-tail cording have all be hand stitched into place. The other night, I realized something about this mappah. I realized that the Schechter school has been using this piece upside down for t...