sarah in nyc

Y came by yesterday  with her mother to pick up her tallit and to tie the tzitzit. As I have mentioned before, she’s a quiet kid.   Her face was so completely  lit up  when she saw the tallit that I knew that I had  nailed it. The silk tussah has enough grip to it so the tallit is easy to wear once  it is folded into place. Wearing a slippy tallit is annoying and distracting.   The stripe pattern reads like a traditional tallit, despite the imagery not being exactly traditional.   I like that it has appeal both far away and close up. I look forward to seeing this tallit on Y this Shabbat.

Y’s grandmother was sent this blouse from her Romanian cousins when she was twelve. Y’s grandmother died just a few months ago. we wanted to include the look of this fragile hand embroidered blouse on the pinot /corner pieces of the tallit.   I have been mulling over exactly how to do this for the past couple of months. reproducing the embroidery by hand wasn’t really an option. The stitching floats over too much space to be durable enough for pinot. I had thought that I would hand paint the design. I do however know my limitations. these sort of simple rigid geometric design is really hard for me to paint freehand. I sometimes do what I think of as dumb sewing to get me working. while I was making myself a nightgown I decided to use one of the decorative stitches on my sewing machine. I realized that it was awfully similar to the hand stitching on the Romanian blouse. While it isn’t identical to the original, it looks similar enough to work. I may embroider the ...

OK, when George Bush senior talked about a thousand points of light in that convention speech he was basically trying to get local religious charities to take over the social services responsibilities of the Federal government.  Often when I make a piece of Judaica I try to have it catch the light in a room and throw it back into the eyes of the viewers. A very different sort of points of light. One of the ways that I get that effect is by using threads and paints all with different reflective qualities.   Here is Y’s atara. the silk itself has a bit of a subtle sheen. I painted the letters with paint with added bits of pearlescent and metallic powders. The pomegranate is painted with similarly shimmery paints and then over-stitched with various metallic threads. The atara is bound with a ribbon yarn, stitched down with a bronze colored metallic thread and edged with gold cording. I then ran a line of hand chain stitching in a light blue thread with a bit of silver L...

Because I learned how to sew informally, that is I taught myself my acquisition of sewing skills is uneven.  There are some things that I do easily that most people who sew think of as being difficult. there are other skills that are on the face of it much easier but I have serious trouble doing.   Yesterday I was sewing this tallit stripe onto Y’s tallit.  it took me four tries to get a one foot strip sewn down properly. I had chosen to sew the stripe onto the tallit with a complicated multi part stitch. Each time ripping the old stitching out was a truly horrible job.   If Y or her family are reading this they ought not to fret about all of the old thread schmutz. It will be easy to clean up with a bit of masking tape.   Today however, my work went swimmingly. I added strips of really nice gold and blue braid to the edge of the stripes.   I was recently at Paron Fabrics. I know that  most sewing stored in America sell fabric and n...

Or perhaps I should re-phrase that as “ It’s a Small World After All”. Often the commissions that I’m working on and the food that I’m cooking are manifestations of similar ideas.   We tend to think of ourselves as Jews as either being Ashenazi or Sephardi. That is either our roots are in Central and Eastern Europe or we trace ourselves to the Middle East, North Africa or Central Asia after the the times of the destruction of the Temple. In the last few years I have been realizing more and more that those categories are far more permeable and flexible than I had been brought up to believe. While it is one thing to understand that the Ottoman Empire reached the gates of Vienna, it is another to finally get that our grandparents who lived in what on paper may have been part of the Russian empire , also were shaped by that easy access to Turkey, and Greece and Bulgaria and parts further East.   Earlier this year I read that even before the rise of Chassidism in the 17...

  After a long pause, it was time to get back to work on Y’s tallit. Above you see the sketch I had made for Y during our initial  meeting. You can see that the sketch is pretty, well sketchy. The point of the sketch is to give my client ( and me) a visual reminder of what the final tallit will look like.   One of my quirks about tallitot has come from my years of going to services. I tend to look around at the tallitot that the people who sit in front of me are wearing. In woven tallito the stripes read on both sides of the tallit. So when you flip the tallit over your shoulders the stripes on the top layers interact with the stripes on the lower layers. It looks great. If however you wear an appliqued tallit, the underside of the tallit is often distressingly white and naked looking. Clearly most tallit makers don’t share my horror of   blank bottomed tallitot.  I deal with my horror of the blank backed tallit by appliqueing and embroidering strip...

I am just beginning work on a tallit for Y.  I know her parents from before they got married. Y’s grandmother died just a few months ago. Y was close to her grandmother. We may incorporate some textiles that had belonged to Y’s grandmother into the tallit.   Y is quiet and thoughtful. She’s one of those kids who needs time to think things over. because she needs time to process ideas and to think about what it is that she really wants , we divided our design session into two parts. Y is a small kid. Probably, like her mother she will reach her full height once she is in her early 20’s. At this moment Y deals with both the gifts and difficulties of being much smaller than most of her contemporaries. On the one hand, strangers tend to think that she is brilliant. On the difficult side of the scale she looks far younger than her peers.     Y chose the verse “( God) stretches out the heavens like a curtain” from the Psalm we recite when we put on the tal...