sarah in nyc

Because I had sold my only copy of this matza cover, it was time to make some new ones for my stash. I really like the design. my lettering has improved a whole lot since this was made several years ago. The center of the matza cover is made out of a quilting cotton that is no longer in print. Now that I have access to really beautiful silks and wools, it seems like a waste of time to make challah covers and matza covers in quilting cottons.   The stone path through the water is the major focal point of the matza cover, so I had to figure something out. I’m also trying to figure out how to do work in less obsessively labor intensive ways. When I actually sit down to figure out how much I make per hour, it can be pretty depressing.   I decided to try painting the rocks. I pulled a piece of  ivory wool/rayon broadcloth out of my stash. my tallit is made out of this wool as is my son’s. This is what I came up with. Rocky enough for you? I then cut strips ou...

and why not. When I had posted this  challah cover Kathleen asked how I get the color variation in the text. I made the next challah cover so I could illustrate how.   I had learned how to do this cool trick from Ellen Alt, my calligraphy teacher. You work with two pots of color. Choose two colors that will look good when mixed. As you paint the text, alternate the colors you did your brush in. do not clean your brush between colors. See your kindergarten teacher spin in her grave, but just keep dipping your brush and not cleaning it between colors. The colors end up blending in a cool way. You may notice that the text does not stand out as much as it usually does.  as I was leafing through Shabbat z’miroti   table songs I was drawn to this poem. Ki Eshmirah Shabbat . You can listen to the melody . It’s a great melody.   As I was calligraphing the text I remembered that I actually don’t like the words themselves all that much. You can see ...

    When I work on a piece I’m often influenced by what I’m hearing as I work. This is certainly true of my next challah cover. I had done the text and the borders on this challah cover quite some time ago. The piece looked nice but a little bleak. As I decided what music to put on  while I worked, I remembered that my sister had asked me to find a song that was deeply meaningful to her.   As I have written before, I grew up in Quincy Massachusetts. Both of my parents are American born. They  were profoundly influenced by the establishment of the State of Israel. They decided to raise their children to be Hebrew speaking. Rather than speaking to us in both Hebrew and English, they spoke to us only in Hebrew. They assumed that learning English, in the gutter, so to speak, would work as well as it did for my mother, who was brought up speaking Yiddish at home, and learned to speak English on the streets of Brooklyn.   While we didn’t have playma...

then it is easier to do it.   My student came for her second lesson today. She had decided to make a circle or infinity scarf for her mother out of some beige crinkle  silk chiffon she had seen in my sash.   The color was not my color.  It had arrived in a Fabric Mart mystery bundle.  I would assume that most sewing teachers would not give their students silk chiffon to play with on their second lesson. My investment in the fabric was  $1.5o per yard. I was happy for my student to make he mother the scarf out of it.   First I taught her the how to pull a thread so she could cut a straight line in the fabric. Yes, it’s pesky and boring, but it’s the easiest method to cut a straight line.     Then I had my student sew a French seam on the join of the circle scarf.  It sounds fancy, it looks fancy but it isn’t all that hard to do.  Here is her French seam.   Next, we discussed how to edge the scarf.  ...

I'm getting down to the wire on both the "not Mets" tallit and Naomi's tallit.  Naomi's tallit is really close to done. It is awaiting topstitching and the atara and pinot. Like Naomi, it is quiet but glows. The "not Mets" tallitis in many ways more technically difficult. I  cut the white tussah silk to size and serged it to prevent shredding. Again, I'm so happy with my new serger. My old one would have had trouble cutting the edge and would have been spitting and complaining. This serger just cut through the thick rough silk like"buttah". I was thinking about turning the edges and just having a  narrow plain hem. Then I remembered the beautiful roll of black and white striped grosgrain ribbon that I had fished out of the remnant bin at Metro Textile. Kashi let me buy the roll for a pittance. I folded it in half and edged the entire tallit with the ribbon. I love how the striped ribbon makesthe rough silk look elegant. I also love how th...

Naomi is a twin. I'm making a tallit for her and one for her brother. When I was growing up, it was fashionable to treat twins as if they were a set of book ends. Twins were dressed alike and expected to be alike, even if they were not. Fortunately, Naomi and her brother have parents who get that being born on the same day does not mean that they share a brain and a soul. Naomi wasn't even sure if she wanted a tallit before she met with me. By the time she left though, she had decided that she did want a tallit. She wanted a tallit that was fairly quiet. She chose this not quite a color called fawn. The fabric she chose though, is a really lovely charmeuse. It feels wonderful on. I have discovered that my clients fall into one of two camps, the ones that love smooth and silky and the ones that don't. Naomi is a smooth and silky loving girl. I have been working on creating the stripes for this tallit. I have been using an embellishemnt technique adapted from Bird Ross...

"And I will carry you on Eagle's wings", was the verse that really  struck home for Natalee from her Bat- Mitzvah torah reading. So we decided to make that the focal point of her tallit. Lately I have begun the work of designing a tallit/prayer shawl by having my clients try on lengths of raw fabric. My clients seem to divide themselves into two camps, there are the folks who want silky and those who want texture. Natalee was a silky girl. The base of her tallit is ivory colored silk charmeuse. I made the wings out of four layers of metallic/silk organza. I sketched an abstracted eagle wing onto tracing paper, flipped it and traced it's partner from the first sketch. Then, I went over the sketch using my sewing machine threaded with black thread. One normally doesn't think of a sewing machine as a drawing tool, but that's exactly how I used it. After establishing the design, I cut away different layers of the organza, some from the front and some from...

So, here it is, my second try at getting Deborah's kippah right. You can see the obsessive quilting.The decorative trim was fun to do. I chalked a line on the quilted fabric, measuring from the fold. Then, I lay a length of maroon velvet ribbon on the chalked line.  I embroidered the line of diamonds using the adorable stitch on my machine. Yes, the embroidery is both functional and decorative. My history of architecture professor would be proud. Not only does the embropidery echo that Bauhaus credo of "form follows function", it also echoes the OCD quilting.The two rows of copper colored soutache were couched using a three stepped zig zag stitch. Many thanks to my model, who was not a pill.

I have a tallit due at the end of January. The silk for that tallit still has not arrived so I decided to begin work on a tallit that isn't due until the end of the spring. The late spring tallit is being made out of a fawn colored charmeuse. The stripes are being made out of what I call "crazy stitching". I had first seen crazy stitching in an article by the brilliant Bird Ross in an old issue of Threads magazine. In the article Bird Ross described a brilliant way to make a reversible vest. She sewed the vest and the lining together right sides out. She then covered all of the raw edges with squares of fabric set on point and folded over the raw edges. After securing all those fabric squares, she then stitched over those now triangles ( diamonds folded in half) with multicolored threads zigzagging back and forth. The vests are great. I have made several of them. But that multi colored wild stitching technique is something I have used over and over in my work, not just...

The woman I making the Psalm 104 tallit is a repeat client. I had made her this tallit bag a long time ago. I remember working with my client, but I had no recollection of the bag itself. Yesterday she sent me photos of the bag. I had zero recollection of it. Yet, I have fond memories of the fabrics. Those I remember well. I am more than a little astounded at the amount of labor that I put into the bag. The bag is a riot of embellishment techniques. I see lots of applique and reverse applique, not to mention the beading. I also see the distinct influence of Bird Ross. I think I had seen an article by her in Threads magazine ad was blown away by her work ( that's the reason for all of those nifty squares at the edges of the piece). I see that the bindings were hand dyed. I think that visually my work is more sedate these days. I don't know if that is always a good thing. I am self taught. At the point that I made that bag, I was really confidant in my skills in embellishing fab...

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....

Sara Beth is the girl friend of the son of dear friends. All of our sons should have girl friends like Sara Beth. She is smart, kind, beautiful and funny. She also asked me to make her a tallit . During the summers she works in a Jewish camp in Georgia. The tallit needed to be comfortable in the Georgia heat. She felt that a scarf shape would be easier to manage and keep on her body. The Torah mantle I did in memory of my father was around when I met with Sara Beth. She loved the beading. She also loved the look of the tallit I had done for my older son, a black tallit that my son wanted to look like "outer space". I had hand embroidered stars for the stripes. The fabric we chose for this tallit is a rough woven silk, called "Silk Linen" by the folks at www.supersilk.com . In planning the tallit I had thought that I would double the silk in making the tallit . Yesterday I cut the yardage and realized that the two layers would just be too hot for Georgia summer...

My student is making this dress to wear to a special event. Often, my student will start the design process by going fabric shopping in my work space. She fell in love with a black rayon jersey knit. I don't blame her. I made two dresses out of the same fabric. It feels divine on and has a great drape. Then my student began to sketch a dress with three tiers of ruffles.We drafted and constructed a tank dress out of the rayon based on my students measurements. We planned to suspend the ruffled tiers from the tank dress. My student did a great job of binding the armholes with cross grain strips of the rayon. The results were tidy, a nice testament to her progress over these weeks. We has lots of discussion back and forth about the tiered ruffles and what they ought to look like, and what their placement ought to be, should the tiers start at the neck? or further down on the bodice? I showed my student a dress I had made using circular ruffles at the hem. she loved the restrained loo...

I know, I posted the pictorial panels yesterday. I had thought that they were done and just needed to be bordered in the luscious heavy black silk. I was wrong. This is also why work always takes me longer than I expect. I end up making unplanned for improvements along the way. The pieces take longer-- and it is so worth it. First of all, baby Moses needed simple facial features. The fastest way to add those was via Shiva Paint Stick and a stencil. The little round mouth stencil was courtesy of a hole punched with a standard hole puncher. The eyes, Exacto knifed out of the same piece of paper. Voila... Moses has a cute baby face. Then I noticed that I hadn't covered the outer edges of the panel in fabric . So I cut watery shapes out of shantung scraps. My clever buddies at the Creative Machine list taught me the brilliant trick of using a glue stick to hold down fabric for applique. No, you don't need to use a fancy made for fabric only glue stick available at a premium. R...