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Showing posts with the label tallit

Gifts

One of the great things about sewing is that something that for the rest of the universe is a splurge, like a new dress can be a very small splurge. For the past while I have been careful about adding to my enormous fabric stash. Last week, knowing that my birthday was coming up I  bought some fabric just because as Marie Kondo says, "It sparked joy." Monday I sewed up the dress basing the shape on another dress I made in a similar weight fabric. Normally one cuts a dress on the fold.  What you see is the pattern for half the dress with the center line along the fold.  Cutting a garment that way is a big time saver. I wanted the design centered along the midline of my body.   So I cut the dress out with the fabric flat, unfolded. The dress feels great on. I wore it all day yesterday to celebrate my birthday.  The dress feels like a party. For less than the cost of breakfast at a diner I can enjoy this gift to myself for a long time to come. Erev my birthday Tant...

blogging while ill

 I haven't been posting because I have been sick.   Here I am staying warm. I am still not sure if this is food poisoning or some sort of s stomach bug. The only remotely good thing about this is that I have lost some weight. It would have been nicer to achieve the same result by going to a luxurious spa. Last night I stupidly chose to eat an exciting supper---some chicken soup with big chunks of vegetables. It's back to plain rice and white potatoes for me...what could I have been thinking? Anyway, I couldn't have Miles and his family come by on Sunday as planned to tie the tzitzit so i tied them on my own. I also made Miles a tallit bag.  I used this heavy upholstery weight striped denim in my stash. It wears like iron. I had made myself a skirt out of some of it a few years ago and know that this will wear like iron. Ihe decorative panel is made out more the woven ribbon panel that I had made for the pinot/ corner pieces. I edged it in more of the gold and blue st...

Composing

 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.

DONE!!!!!

 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 ...

A successful work vacation

  This was a truly successful work vacation---that is shifting my attention to a different piece on my to do list.  I finished the tallit last night. When i posted last time I was most of the way through the embroidering of the letters on the atara. My next task was removing the flannel onto which I had calligraphed the text In the past I have used cotton batiste or an old cotton sheet as the, (as it is called in the sewing universe) waste fabric that is then carefully pulled away after the embroidery is completed. Instead, I used the Grateful Dead flannel because it was at hand. The softness of the flannel fivers as opposed to the crisper batiste made removal a bit more difficult. There is always a period of time when the piece looks like a complete disaster. As I worked I thought about the many myths and folk tales where doing a long and boring task is a major plot point. I kept my self on task by listening to podcasts and a thumb drive of old recordings of Jean Shepard from...