sarah in nyc

Yesterday Kira came by to finish tying her tzitzit. She had made a first visit last week but was nearly cross-eyed with exhaustion. Luckily, she lives in the neighborhood so it was easy to reschedule for a time when she wasn’t falling asleep on her feet. Kira wisely decided that her tallit really did need an atara. I made s simple one painting the same scrollwork  motif that I had painted on her pinot /corner pieces. I also stitched on silver sequins on both ends for a little bit  of extra oomph. Kira DID NOT want more text. I like having a bit additional light near the face. She was really pleased  with the result, both of the atara and her tzitzit tying. Last night was the eighth night of Chanukah. Earlier in the week we had given our kids Amazon gift cards. This is what my youngest bought for himself. I think he will actually get a good deal of wear out of them. He plans to wear them as street shoes.] A couple of people wrote to me b...

of the Ultrasuede challa cover. I added lots more flowers, many of them with my pretty little forget-me-not stamp that I carved out of an eraser. I used Shiva paint stick with the stamp. I love how I can add shading to the stamp. I also painted in lots of details by hand. It never fails to amaze me how a little bit of color variation makes a leaf or flower look much more natural. I had decided to carve the edge of the edge of the challa cover with a tool I had bought at Michael's. It is an X-acto blade attached to a heating element. I purchased it with the hopes that it would create a really clean edge. Perhaps the Ultrasuede was too thick for the blade, but I found using it to be really frustrating. So I pulled out my trusty soldering iron and found that despite the fat point on the soldering iron, I got a cleaner edge with that tool. I painted a line of blue around the edge to show that the meandering edge is in fact intentional. Now I have to wrap up the challa cover and mak...

We are going to a wedding next weekend. The groom is the son of dear friends and is a pretty amazing human being. His bride is his match in the wonderful department. Last night I got to work on a challa cover to make as a wedding gift. The text comes from a liturgical poem recited Friday nights in synagogue. In the poem, the Sabbat is referred to as a bride, it seems like a fitting line to use on a wedding gift challa cover. I decided to use Ultrasuede for this piece. It feels so good to paint on Ultrasuede. I also like that it is so easy to care for. Once the colors are set, the challa cover can be hand washed like a pair of stockings and hung up to dry. It's beautiful, isn't it? Actually it looks great, unless you can read Hebrew. I must have gotten distracted while I was doing the calligraphy. When my husband came home, he immediately noticed that I had left out a letter. AAARRRGGGHH!!! I thought about cutting the border out  and then redoing the lettering. I seemed quic...

Naomi is a twin. I'm making a tallit for her and one for her brother. When I was growing up, it was fashionable to treat twins as if they were a set of book ends. Twins were dressed alike and expected to be alike, even if they were not. Fortunately, Naomi and her brother have parents who get that being born on the same day does not mean that they share a brain and a soul. Naomi wasn't even sure if she wanted a tallit before she met with me. By the time she left though, she had decided that she did want a tallit. She wanted a tallit that was fairly quiet. She chose this not quite a color called fawn. The fabric she chose though, is a really lovely charmeuse. It feels wonderful on. I have discovered that my clients fall into one of two camps, the ones that love smooth and silky and the ones that don't. Naomi is a smooth and silky loving girl. I have been working on creating the stripes for this tallit. I have been using an embellishemnt technique adapted from Bird Ross...

I suppose that I could pretend that each time I touch fabric, what comes out is prefection itself. But the reality is that I make mistakes all of the time. I mean, all of the time. Take Sara Xing's tallit, as an example. Some pieces of the tallit came together just so easily. Piecing the scenes, was frankly, a piece of cake. Not one curse passed my lips as I was making them. Cutting the black silk has been hard. In order to get the cutting line exact I have to pull a thread and then cut along the line left by the missing thread. Unfortunately, the silk is woven out of so many fine strands of silk that it is really hard to see that nearly invisible line so I can cut it. If I pretend to have x-ray vision it helps a bit. Attaching the black silk "frames" around then pictorial scenes I ran into trouble of my own making. For years I had struggles with a lemon of a serger. My repair guy helped me avoid troubles by fixing the blade in the on only position. The serger was like ...