sarah in nyc

A Women's Minyan /Prayer Group asked me to come up with honors cards. At a service, there are various honors to be distribulted. On a regular Shabbat there are eight readings from the Torah. A member of the community honored by being called forward to recite the blessings before and after that reading. The Torah scroll is raised after the reading, and then, rolled wrapped and dressed before being returned to the ark. In some synagogues, the honors are simply given out verbally.( Someone will come up to you and ask if you want an aliya /to be called up to the Torah) Other synagogues give out cards. I guess the advantage of the cards is that the honoree knows for sure exactly which aliya they are being called up for.  It also helps the person giving out the honors keep track of what has already been given out and what is yet to be given out. Hebrew is a gender language. Unlike English , the words for numbers differ if they object being counted is masculine or f...

The bag was looking a little stark to my eye. So I added some glitzier gold thread to both the circle around the moon and to the wolf. That addition seemed to have brightened up the bag enough so it no longer looked depressed. My friend Sandy, commented that she liked the simplicity of the landscape. I liked it too, but it was just a bit too dour as it was. My Art History professors used to talk about balance in a painting. The bag just a bit off balance in it's deep darkness. I also added a blue seed bead for the wolf's eye. You can't see it in the photo, and it isn't even that visible in real life, but it just catches a bit more light and brightens the bag up a bit more. The wool flannel seems to absorb all light around it, so I need do do what I can to counteract that a bit. I fused both the front and the back of the bag to fusible fleece so it will have a bit more heft. I also managed to sew the bag together incorrectly three times. I inserted a light blue zipper a...

Today I edged the old shul tallit with bronze metallic middy ribbon. The ribbon gives a tidy edge. I like working with it because it has a fair amount of body and doesn't slide around a whole lot. I had gotten a huge cone of 3/4 inch wide ribbon several years ago at Tinsel Trading. I use it a a ton, not only because I have so much of it, but also I like how the bronze is a lot less flashy looking than a regular bright gold. The corner pieces were to have Samuel's answer when he was called by God., Hineini , "Here I am." In Hebrew, that word is made up of four letters. I played with several ways to lay out the word, in a tight circle, in a diamond. I finally hit on the idea of repeating the word in each of the four corners of each pina/corner piece. I drafted a three inch square and calligraphed the words. Then I tweaked the edges of the letters with a fine tipped pen. Finally, I cut out the letters using an X-acto knife. I'm using a maroon velveteen for the pinot....

A big shawl tallit is seen on both the right and the wrong side of the fabric. This works just fine for a traditional woven tallit. The woven stripes can be seen both on the face and the reverse of the fabric. When you work with a tallit that is sewn , or pieced, rather than woven this does not naturally occur. I find tallitot with what I think of as naked undersides to be rather distressing. Maybe it is an OCD thing, but they really bother me in a visceral way. Those tallitot just seem WRONG. I admit that according to halacha /Jewish law there is nothing wrong with a tallit that is blank on the underside. But to me it feels like something that ought not be done. My neurosis on this matter has led to having to figure out how to construct tallitot that read as stripes on both sides, yet don't have nasty raw edges. Over the years I have come up with several solutions. I had once done a tallit where I hemmed each stripe before attaching it to the next stripe with a three step zi...

The text for this atara/neckband comes from the biblical story of Samuel. The boy, Samuel, is called by God in the night. Samuel thinks he is being called by his mentor, rushes to him and says " (Here I am) because you called me". I wrote the text out with ink on cardstock using a square tipped paint brush. I then cut the letters out using an X-acto knife. I used the cards with the cut out letters as a stencil. the color was shiva paintstick applied with a stiff stencil brush. I'm loving the wide letters. The actual color of the silk is a deeper maroon. I had already stencilled the Florentine grille design. I love how using the stencil results in such risp lettering.

When it was time for my daughter to study for her Bat Mitzvah we hired a teacher to work with her. Either my husband or I could have taught her, but given where she was emotionally at the time, it seemed better to have her learn with someone else. When it was time for my older son to begin to study, I started to work with him with the assurance that if he wanted to work with someone who was not his mother, we would find him a teacher. We worked in little snippets of time early in the mornings. I don't think we could have found a teacher to show up for ten minutes at a time, at 7:00am. We worked well together. We have a fairly easy relationship.r When our youngest was 10 or so, my husband went to a charity auction. One of the items in the silent auction was Bar Mitzvah lessons with Jerry. Jerry runs an alternative Hebrew School and has prepared hundreds and hundreds of kids for their B'nai Mitzvah. my husband bid on the lessons and won. Jerry was one of the people that helped...

Most tallitot have stripes. Most of those stripes fall into one of several possible stripe patterns. You can see some examples that I had sketched out to give Elisa some ideas of the possibilities. I had already stencilled out the wide stripes, using a commercial architectural stencil. I needed to also do a couple of narrower stripes to work with the wide stencil. Today, at services my friend Jerry showed me the Megilla that had been illuminated as a gift for him by calligrapher Jay Greenspan. All of the decorative elements in the Megilla scroll were taken from our beautiful synagogue http://www.anschechesed.org/ and reproduced in miniature form. Here was the fabulous Moorish style stencils added to the bimah in the 1940's. There were the images from the stained glass windows in our beautiful chapel. When I got home I realized that I could create a smaller version of the lovely Florentine stencil I had used for the wider stripes. I then stencilled the narrower stripes with this si...

While pieces of the design process take place before I even put my hand to fabric, there are always improvements that take place as I work. Often, work on one piece gives me ideas that I then apply to a different piece. I have been playing with stencils lately. My son's tallit has those naturalistic looking green willow leaves. Elisa's tallit has that ornate Florentine architectural stencil in gold. As looked at Sara's tallit , I realized that it looked a bit dour. It needed a bit more of-- something. The something came by way of stencil. I cut a stencil out of an index card and applied gold colored oil paint stick through the stencil. In each case, while the technique may be identical, but the look is not at all the same ( or even similar) . I particularly like how in Sara's tallit the colors of the tallit , very mid-century colors, influenced the modern look of the stencil. I also found it fascinating to see how the same paint stick applied to the red/ maroon...

Today, I worked on making stripes that looked like water for my son's tallit . I cut two stencils out of index cards, after first drawing simple wave shapes on the cards with a pencil I used two different shades of blue oil paint sticks with an occasional, sparing use of yellow, and a slightly more aggressive use of white. This took a while, and doing this sort of repetitive work for a long period of time gets me slightly zoned out. By the time I am done, I feel like I have been under water for a long time. Shifting from seeing the piece from a myopic perspective to seeing it the way other folks will, is always a surprise. It always amazes me when it actually looks good. So many of the small bits offer so many opportunities for unhappiness. But the whole always looks better than it's individual parts. These stripes really do have the look of a river. I finished the willowy stripes as well. I have to let all of these strips sit for a couple of days before I set the color with a...