sarah in nyc

 My last post created a bit of a conversation. My friend Nancy was impressed with the  shrug  I had made and mentioned that she couldn't even thread a needle. I told Nancy that I could teach her how to thread a needle in a way that doesn't require the best vision. Ronna then asked that I give her a tutorial...so here it is. I learned this method of threading needles from a needlepoint book when I was a kid. As you can imagine, threading a needle with yarn is not the easiest task. Once I learned this method I no longer wet the end of a thread with saliva and hope for the best. My eyes are no longer what they were when I was eleven or twelve and this method has worked for me even when I am due for a new prescription on my eyeglasses.   Some of the photos in this tutorial were taken by me as I was threading needles ( Yes, it is tricky to be both threading needles and taking photos of the process.)and some were taken by my husband so some of the thread is black and ...

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

There are times when in theory a task seems simple, but when you get into the weeds of it it is crazy making. I am making a  Kittel for a client. My client is a woman who hates how the standard kittel makes her look like a tuber wearing a belt. Because she will be leading services in the kittel she wants the finished garment to be flattering but not sexy. I suggested a princess lined dress or lightweight coat. After going through hundreds of possible patterns online I thought that this dress would work best with some alterations. ( The dress would need to be lengthened by quite a bit, I would add a more dramatic cuff and of course a belt). I ordered the magazine and got my code to download the PDF pattern. The pattern itself is divided up between 21 sheets of paper and several more pages of instruction.  Each page needs two slivers trimmed off of the edges so that you can properly align the sheets and piece them into the full sized pattern. E...

After I posted the last batch of photos about Cavill's tallit someone who has known me since before I was born commented that I was talented. While it is always nice to receive a compliment, I actually don't think that a good piece is really a result of talent, but rather is is the end result after hundreds and hundreds of failures. Amazon.com Widgets So at this point the tallit is pieced, nicely edged and is awaiting the atara/ neckband and the pinot /corner pieces. I'm really excited and want to share some photos. No you are not imagining the hundreds of untrimmed threads. I will trim all of the threads but I was really excited and photographed with all of the mess. Hope you can see past the threads. Yes, the text appears upside down  when the tallit is simply draped and not folded into proper wearing shape. This does look like an error but it is deliberate. This tallit makes me so completely happy. It fits so comfortably into the vernacular of a tr...

I know that often in my work I manage to make too much work. I can take a crazy hodge podge of wild colors and textures that ought to be fighting against one another and get them to play together nicely. Cavill's tallit though is all about restraint. It is just black and white.  Amazon.com Widgets You might think that I would be fighting against the restraints that this simplicity imposes on me, but I really love it. One advantage of thcreating something with a riot of details is that some of the niggeldy technical bits can be hidden underneath all of the glitz and glitter. I had stitched each white panel of text to it's black partner, treating each one like one unit. I then stitched the panels to the main body of the tallit. This side has a clean seam. The other side has raw edges that need to be covered. Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there are lots of ways to cover a seam. If i hadn't had a series of long conversations with my client, I might...