sarah in nyc

A coupe of words of warning before you read this post. I realize that this post may be of zero interest to anyone but me. It is about the truly annoying process I have been going through to figure out how to do what ought to be a simple task. The finished piece will be wonderful. This particular journey has been an exercise in frustration. I guess I am writing about it because a finished piece usually doesn't show the many stumbles in the road to getting there. I am showing you all of those stumbles, but please feel free to skip this post. I promise my feelings won't be hurt. I am making an atara ( the neckband for a tallit) with a nice kid in my synagogue who is having his bar-mitzvah next month. He came up with a pretty brilliant concept for the atara- he wanted several texts from the morning prayers on his atara. We talked about what this ought to look like. We agreed that it should look kind of like an old fashioned prayer book. Many old prayer books are typeset in a ...

Perhaps my daughter was feeling a bit sentimental. Or perhaps it is because complicated braids are now in vogue, but my daughter asked me to braid her hair into a complicated braid.   It’s been a really long time since I have done anything like this for my daughter. The hair braiding used to be part of our daily morning ritual. We probably haven’t done this for seven or eight years. And while the camera was out, my older son was sitting in the living room.  He has the same square head my father had. I know that the term blockhead is often derogatory, but you could easily replace my son’s head with a cube.  He may have a block head, but he does not act like one.  I love how his face and body create so many right angles. I don’t just spend al of my time admiring my kids. I also think I have finished transferring all of the texts for the table book.   Since this book is a wedding gift, I had discussed using verses from the Song of Songs with my ...

After a few false starts…. Photocopier toner and printer toner has changed formulation over the past few years making doing photo transfers an entirely new adventure. Luckily the photocopy place around the corner has a machine with toner  that works for my specifications.   I’m pretty pleased with the results. There are many more texts to go, but it’s nice to no longer feel completely frustrated. I’m choosing old fashioned clunky types on purpose.  Most of the prayer books that I’m selecting from were set in type in the 1920’s or earlier.

I finally got the images properly transferred to silk.   Perhaps the ink that my printer uses is no longer compatible with the Bubble Jet but the images washed out of the fabric when they were washed with detergent. I turned to an older. low tech method of transferring images to fabric, where you lift the toner off of a photocopy using iron on mending material and then transfer the image to the silk. It’s a two step process but I have done it often enough so that it’s second nature to me.   It is frustrating that something that ought to have taken fifteen minutes has taken nearly a weeks’ worth of  work time  to get right.  it is finally done so now I can work on getting the rest of the bag completed.

I have spent much of the last few days trying to transfer these images onto silk for  the lining  of the tallit bag.   I had prepared the silk shantung with a chemical that allows the ink from my printer to set permanently onto the silk.  The product has a really stupid name, Bubble Jet 2000, but it works really well. Printers don’t love to print fabric, so you have to trick them into the job. I had prepared the silk, and then ironed it onto some  wax coated  cloth backing with the trade name Chartex.  Chartex was created to back photographs. A neighbor had given me a box years ago. We had thought that it would work to actually transfer the image from a photocopy to fabric. The Chartex was useless for that task.  It is wonderful though for giving the fabric enough body so it can go through a printer without destroying it. Chartex is no longer being manufactured and I have most of a box of 100 sheets so I’m set until I find something bet...

Late night TV is filled with ads promising to help inventors. This photo shows a Jewish ritual object that I invented about fifteen years ago. Shabbat ends with a short ceremony, called havdalah , speration.  During havdalah we smell sweet spices to ease our transition from the holiness of Shabbat to work- a –day life. My invention was transferring the text of the havdalah onto a bag filled with sweet spices. When you hold the bag when you recite the prayer the spices get released into the air. This morning I got an email asking if I had any havdalah bags available to be picked up this afternoon.. I didn’t. I did have an order for another bag so I made both together. I made one bag extra, which is still unembellished, but will be ready with just a few moments of needle play.

Dingles One of the nice things about working at home, as opposed to working in a self contained studio is that there is a constant parade of people wandering in and out of my apartment , who will offer feedback on my work.  Sometimes they will catch a typo (always appreciated) Other times, a passing comment may have me re- think a problem I am having with a piece. Clients will often see work in progress and it will often inform their own choices in their own commissions. Challa cover, ready to be packaged I had thought that this challa cover was done. My husband took a close look and asked, “ No dingles???” Dingles are what we call the beaded tassels I often add to the corners of my challa covers. I don’t like disappointing my husband, so I added the dingles. Each corner is slightly different. The dingles add a certain extra measure of delight to an already lively challa cover. Just in case the photos, and the painted silk and the embroidered binding were not enough to de...

Photo Challa Cover VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL   The recipient of this Challa cover said that she loves natural colors like purple and green. The silks were in my stash. painting the silk with the tendrils feels as satisfying as doodling in the margins of my notebooks did in High School. The outer border is printed with a commercial stamp . Printing with a color so close to the silk’s blue gives a brocade lik...