sarah in nyc

 When Bonnie met with me several weeks ago about making her tallit she spoke about wanting the stripes to resemble the ocean from her childhood on the Massachusetts coast. The beach we visited most often in my childhood was just a few miles away in Westport, Massachusetts, the spectacular Horseneck Beach. I haven't been there in more than thirty five years but the colors of that water are deeply imprinted in my brain. I know that water not from looking at photos but from being inside of that water with long strands of seaweed wrapping themselves around my legs. I know that water from being tumbled by the waves, from floating on top of that water from having my mouth filled with that water. I had dyed the grosgrain ribbon that borders the ocean dyed silk to look like sky---to tie in with the atara. I used the scallop stitch on my machine to look like ripples of water. I used more of the silk that I had dyed to look like the water off the south coast of Massachusetts   for ...

 Normally I will post about a piece as I am working away on it.  as many of you are learning Covid is a real energy suck. I could have either worked on Liat's tallit or I could have blogged about it. I was unable to do both. I could delay writing a blog post but the bat-mitzvah wasn't going to wait for me to get better. So I chose to work even in my diminished state. Covid did make lots of the tasks involved in making this tallit take much longer than normal. Case in point, the pinot or corner pieces. Under normal circumstances, they would have been completed in a day.  With Covid, the task took five days.  As of this minute, the tallit itself is completed. Some of my sewing buddies detest sewing for others and never do it. Some of them find working with a client to be an entirely unpleasant experience. As I look at this tallit I love it because I never in a million years would have envisioned the sight of the sounds at Mount Sinai to be the color spectrum. How freak...