sarah in nyc

 Yesterday, the tallit that I was mending got picked up. All of the bits that get touched in normal wear  just got worn out. I backed the edges near the atara with silk chiffon and just stitched and stitched away with silk thread. One sees this kind of work on really old garments from the early 20th century. The fabric was just too fragile to stitch by machine. hopefully I have strengthened the material enough so the tallit can be cleaned and then worn  for the big family event coming up in a couple of weeks. Yesterday  we went on a little adventure to  Little Island . It is an island constructed on a series of plant like cement pods on stems planted into the Hudson River. from outside of the island it looks like a completely artificial man made folly. While on the island it feels like a series of sloping bits of wildlife. It's both very beautiful and really silly. There is an amphitheater space within Little island and some dancers were rehearsing. While we wat...

 There are some pieces that I make and then I never see again.  Hilary's tallit  is a piece that I suspect that I will have a long relationship with. Hilary came to me after she had experienced a series of deaths in her family.  The tallit that I made for Hilary is made out of  her late father in law's white silk opera scarf, a red silk scarf that Hilary had given to her mother before she had died and part of the tallit that had belonged to her great grandfather. This tallit was part of Hilary's emerging from the land of sickness and death and carrying the memory of people she loved with her. The silk tallit was fragile. When I made the tallit we discussed that it may very well disintegrate. In 2018, I encased the most damaged bits in tulle. I used a combination of hand and machine mending to do my best to keep the tallit intact. A few weeks ago Hilary got in touch with me. Some of the fringe was torn off by a chair. The damage looked drastic.  Once the tal...

 When Judith brought me this tallit to mend I had assumed that the the right way to go about the job was to add patches to cover the worn away bits. I dyed a couple of lengths of silk to use for the patches. Unfortunately as I was about to begin patching, I realized that a patch would cause further damage. The weight of the heavier fabric would break the existing fabric. Luckily I have more than one mending trick up my sleeve. I needed to strengthen the weak parts of the fabric.I put some turquoise tulle behind the worn bits of the tallit and grafted the tulle and the silk together using embroidery thread. here it is from the front and from the reverse The stitching is still incomplete and the tulle will be trimmed. Here is the same process on the other side of the atara. The embroidery threads on their own are fragile. The tulle on its own is fragile. The silk tallit is fragile from wear but joined together the three weak things are strong. You can create your own d'var torah...

 For reasons that I don't understand, the work that I do comes in waves. there were years when most of my work was making chuppot,  wedding canpopies. Other years are filled with making nothing but challah covers or tallitot. This has been a year of mending.  There have been many, many mending projects that I have worked on over the past several months.  Several months ago my shul buddy Chris asked me if I would take on the task of mending his wedding tallit.  Chris and his wife are celebrating a big anniversary later this month. I love that Chris loves his wife so much, loves his marriage so much that it really mattered to him that his wedding tallit be fixed. The tallit was made by a sweet woman who was sort of a wild and wooly craft person. She painted Chris's tallit on China silk. China silk is a very pretty, inexpensive and fragile silk that shreds if  you sneeze.  Making a tallit out of China silk (this isn't just silk woven in China but a type o...