sarah in nyc

A while back I got an email from Gavi. She had found me through my blog and wondered if I could turn the lace from her wedding dress into the edging for her tallit. Gavi is tall. Her elegant wedding dress had a tulle split over-skirt all edged in lace. It was a lot of lace. Amazon.com Widgets My first problem was figuring out how to price such a task. My wise friends from my online sewing discussion group suggested that set a timer, unpick a foot a foot of lace, stitch it to a piece of silk and then see how long that took and then multiply that by the number of linear feet in the tallit. I'm glad that I have wise friends because otherwise I would have charged far too little for the task. On my own, I would have charged so little that workers in China would have refused to take the job for so little money for so much time. Luckily I have friends smarter than I am. For the last few days I have been slowly doing all of the hand embroidery for Charlie's tallit. My hand  a...

My mother used to describe house work she hated to do in toilet cleaning units. So cleaning the oven,  in pre self cleaning oven days, was equivalent to cleaning ten toilets.  Washing the living room windows was five toilets. I still think of some jobs in terms of their toilet value. A few years back I was asked to make fundraising calls  for my son’s school by a professional fundraiser. I told her that I would happily clean all of the school’s toilets instead. No, I didn’t have to clean the school’s toilets, but i also didn't have to make the phone calls. Un-sewing, or undoing sewing is a job I hate. The only thing worse than undoing regular machine sewing is un-sewing a serged seam. In my impatience in sewing the borders on the photo challa cover I serged the borders on crooked. definitely a three toilet kind of a job. I procrastinated. I couldn’t put it off any longer and pulled out my favorite seam ripper, an X-acto knife. It was slow going . So, I pulled out a r...

I had sewn binding along the edges of Sara-Beth's tallit. I'm actully not sure o the fiber content, but it is a lovely black silky fabric. I sewed it on by serging the raw edges together and then topstitching with a three step zig zag. Unfortunately I had to undo the binding on one of the long sides. My eyes were really not up to the task. Luckily I remembered one of the members of the Creative Machine List mentioning how she used to use a single edge razor as a seam ripper when she was a young girl. I was able to undo the sewing and not cause any damage. This is a very big deal. I finally got the binding sewn on properly. and I'm happy with it. Next, I turned to the corner pieces, or Pinot. There is a tradition to have the corner pieces totally blend in with the tallit and the tzitzit. I don't follow that tradition. I like to have the pinot be really wonderful to look at, so one's attention is brought to the tzitzit, which are of course the most important part of t...

I suppose that I could pretend that each time I touch fabric, what comes out is prefection itself. But the reality is that I make mistakes all of the time. I mean, all of the time. Take Sara Xing's tallit, as an example. Some pieces of the tallit came together just so easily. Piecing the scenes, was frankly, a piece of cake. Not one curse passed my lips as I was making them. Cutting the black silk has been hard. In order to get the cutting line exact I have to pull a thread and then cut along the line left by the missing thread. Unfortunately, the silk is woven out of so many fine strands of silk that it is really hard to see that nearly invisible line so I can cut it. If I pretend to have x-ray vision it helps a bit. Attaching the black silk "frames" around then pictorial scenes I ran into trouble of my own making. For years I had struggles with a lemon of a serger. My repair guy helped me avoid troubles by fixing the blade in the on only position. The serger was like ...