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Showing posts with the label Tristan's tallit

Tzitzit Tying, Tallit bag and food Friday

Wednesday my future son-in-law converted to Judaism. Tomorrow he is being called to the Torah for the first time. The tallit and the bag needed to be completed so he could tie the tzitzit before Shabbat. The passive voice is misleading here, I needed to finish the bag and the tallit. Several weeks ago my future son-in-law admired a skirt I was wearing. The fabric was made out of felted strands of orange and yellow yarn fused onto a black gauze. I had fallen in love with the fabric when I had seen it in a fabric store. It was selling for $100/yard. I was in fabric lust, but I do have some self-control, even though it was a fabric so wonderful it showed up in my dreams repeatedly. A couple of years later my favorite internet fabric store was selling 5-yard bundles of the fabric for truly reasonable prices. I bought the orange and yellow fabric and another bundle in purple and brown.   My daughter suggested I make the tallit bag out of the purple fabric...

Quiet but busy

I know I haven't posted in a while. The house has been full of houseguests and I have been kind of under the weather, but I have been working. Amazon.com Widgets I have been working away on my future son-in-law's tallit. Working on this tallit has been a really nice time to work closely with the man who will be sharing my daughter's life. I really appreciate how he puts so much thought into his decision making. He has chosen the Hebrew name, Gideon Ezekiel. Gideon because his late mother was named Deborah, and Gideon is the next prophet. Ezekiel is a family name. We hadn't quite settled on a text to use on the tallit before my husband and I left for our Texas adventure. My future son-in-law said that he wanted the text to somehow convey that he was converting. he had hoped that the text would be connected to either Deborah or Ezekiel. We each had the assignment to go through biblical text in order to find the right verses for his tallit. While I was in shu...

I have been otherwise distracted

I had been hoping for the past few days to be able to write about this beautiful batch of ribbons my friend Pearl had dropped off for me. This is about half of the generous haul. Pearl's mother who died a year or so ago died at well over 100. She was a sewer for all of her life. Pearl's dad was in the children's trimming business. Pearl has been clearing out her mother's apartment. the beautiful lace cloth under the stack of ribbons comes from Pearl's mother. These ribbons are quite old. the ribbon spools are interleaved with paper to protect the silk. A few have brand labels. Most of the ribbons are silk taffeta in white or pastel pink or blue. Quite a few of the spools have never been opened. I love how the ribbons are pinned to show how they look both flat and gathered. I don't know if you can see the tiny flat headed pins holding that ribbon twist in place. While spooling the ribbons and the paper onto the wooden spoons would have been...

Lots of thoughts in my head

My dear friend Marcia (known in our family as Tanta Marcia) invited me to go to a lecture yesterday about  Ludwig Wolpert  given by a Ph.D. candidate at Bard who was writing her dissertation about Wolpert's work during his New York years. Well, going to such a lecture is high up on my idea of fun. Amazon.com Widgets I finally learned the name of Wolpert's first metalsmithing teacher,  Christian Dell . Clearly there was a strong dell influence in Wolpert's work. You can see how the use of actual text used during the ritual when the cup is used rather than Dell's glyphs created a more powerful, more meaningful piece. I loved the lecture, loved seeing deeply familiar and beloved work by Mr. Wolpert. I went home feeling very happy. I knew that something special would be awaiting me. My father's father was born in Konin, Poland and arrived in New York before WW1. My father's mother was born here, but both of her parents were born there too...