sarah in nyc

 Miles' tallit is made up of ribbons that I have combined in various ways and embroidered. Since the tallit will be visible, on what we typically think of in sewing, as both the wrong side and the right side it needs to look good  however you look at it. What this means is that every time I stitch down a ribbon (or an assemblage of ribbons) I need to think about what the underside of my stitching will look like. One of my dining room chairs is standing in for my dressmaking form. I have arranged the tallit so you see all of the stripes from both sides of the tallit. This is the tallit the way it might be worn. There is more work that needs to get done.  But I am really happy with the direction in which this is gong. This has begun to reach the point where it has begun looking like a tallit.

Usually when I do a project it is a collaboration between me and my client.  These two atarot are a collaboration between my client, my sister (who did the calligraphy) and me. This is the atara for the bat mitzvah girl. Below is the atara for her mother. I didn't want the two to be identical despite being made using the same fabric and the same paint colors. I want to show you how I built up the decorative stitching at the ends of the atara. First I stitched rays in straight stitch using gold metallic thread. I thought the diamond shaped stitching would add the right amount of punch. I use a thin bronze colored thread. It is meant to be used in sweater knitting to add a bit of elegant sheen. The thread was not made to run through a sewing machine. If you aren't used to the thread it breaks often and causes the user to do a great deal of cursing.  After so many years ( I have a giant cone of this thread) I have terrorized the thread into...

Usually, when I make a tallit I meet with the person who will be wearing the tallit. As we talk, I can pick up verbal and non-verbal cues that help me design the final piece. Right now I am working on a tallit that is a bit different. I am meeting with the person who is giving the tallit and not the person who is receiving the tallit. This makes my task a bit more difficult. I look at my notes from the meeting. The words blue/grey, blue/silver, many shades of blue and quiet/Zen keep showing up. The buyer of the tallit loved a bit of slate blue-grey silk. That bit of silk was small and has been block printed for a different project. I don't have any more of that exact bit of silk-- I do have grey silk but with a greenish cast.  I have one small bit of sapphire blue silk that is a shot silk, that is the warp threads are bright blue and the weft threads are black and that silk makes the grey read a bit bluer rather than greenish. The tallit needs to read as something quiet and ...

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 have been working since last week on the border for Jean's atara/tallit neckband. The border serves both ta visual function and well as a structural one. Visually, just about anything looks better with a good border. ideally the border will repeat or emphasis elements that are found elsewhere in a tallit, its a visual coda. Amazon.com Widgets From a structural point of view a good border serves the same function as those round white loose-leaf reinforcements that most of us used in elementary school. It gives an area of tallit that gets a fair amount of wear some additional stability. The fabulous silk Jean chose for her tallit has a complicated strip pattern with straight stripes as well as squiggly zig zaggy stripes woven into the fabric.  I realized that if I embroidered a ribbon with a combination of stitches and threads I could create something similar to the look of the stripes on the silk. Given the size of the atara that meant embroidering 68 inches of r...

Drawing with a sewing machine is definitely an off label use of power tools.  But after a couple of days of trying to avoid the task I plunged in.   I used this drawing of a wing via Google images as my source inspiration. I drew the top arc of the winds onto the flannel I had used to back the silk.  If I were a different kind of a worker, I would have transferred the design onto a grid to enlarge the design. I just drew the design while I looked at the original wing.   I then loaded the sewing machine  bobbin with silver thread and sewed along the green line. I kept the drawing next to me as I first stitched the outer edges of the feathers.  Then I gritted my teeth and added the feathers.  the more I worked the more control I had over the process. I kept pressing down on the ‘ go backwards’ lever on the machine. Astonishingly …it really looks like feathers.   After I was done I pulled all of the threads to the back until my ey...