sarah in nyc

 Well, this has been a week with a great deal of progress on the restoration of the Schechter Mappah. I refreshed the lettering on the Ultrasuede panels with text. You see this panel  with two lines of text re-blackened. Here is the text for the kaddish re-blackened  and I hadn't yet repainted the cute little decorative elements. There are so many tasks that need to be done to restore this piece.  The next task that I was ready to tackle was edging the blue wool around the dome. This was a multi staged process. Stage one was stitching the wool around the edges of the Ultrasuede. That step required some X-ray vision, or more accurately some peeking beneath the surface to see that I was placing my stitches in the right place. The stitching both stabilizes the blue wool and serves as a guide line for the next step in the process. After I completed the row of stitching I trimmed the blue wool close to the stitching line so i could begin the next part of the job. Stage tw...

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

I recently got a message from a woman who had heard that I was a good person to turn a shawl into a tallit.  I told her that I was and we met later on that day. She brought me a beautiful olive green woven shawl woven with a lovely diaper pattern ( that's the pretty diamond woven design) and with a truly lovely woven band in red, blue and orange near the fringed ends. When you look at the photos in this post, please be aware that for some reason my camera had trouble with the colors in this shawl and the green that looks chartreuse in the images is really a soft olive. I wasn't able to use my photo editor to get the colors to read properly. You really do have to trust me on this one. My task with this tallit was to create corner pieces that worked with this lovely bit of woven wool. I had hoped that I might find a bit of vintage embroidered woven or embroidered textile in my stash. While going through my pretty bits of vintage goodies was fun, nothing worked wit...

I suppose if I were a smarter business woman I wouldn’t have chosen to do teeny chain stitching around each of the letters on Charlie’s atara . But ultimately I worry more about getting the piece to look right than about dollars and cents.   I used the sewing machine to do the borders on the atara, a black diamond stitch and then the whole piece is edged with gold blanket stitching. My design had called for sprays of wheat. I used a mix of threads, copper metallic, the black and gold metallic I had used on the letters and an ivory sewing thread to make the wheat stalks.   I had thought that each grain of wheat could be formed by a single chain stitch. The idea worked fine in my head but in real life I just couldn’t get those grains to look right. I slept on the problem and came up with a different solution.   I did not do a whole lot of hand embroidery as a kid.  My older sister was pretty serious about embroidery when she was in her teens. She s...

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...