Janet's Tallit

I was thinking I'd get some photos when I delivered this, but when you deliver something at the end of Purim festivities, there tends to be not quite sufficient light. Another time! As such, I only have a couple pictures its progress.

For the atarah, Janet wanted the text from the beginning of Psalm 121 (I lift my eyes to the mountains...). I painted it in in silver with a charcoal metallic border around the letters to make them more readable, and added a translation in English along the very bottom. She also wanted mountains on the tallit, and so I did some painting.

I centered the mountain so that when Janet wears the tallit, you get a clear mountain scene on the back and a more abstract colored look from the front. The green pattern along the bottom was later shaded in using a lighter green to give a sense of new green fields, snowy mountains, and bright blue sky. The sky part was my favorite. You know how, on certain perfect winter days, the sky turns a brilliant, crisp blue? That's the color Janet wanted. I dyed the fabric in a gradient. I knew a whole lot of the tallit was going to be just blue, so I wanted some whorls and freckles and variations in the dye to give it texture and interest and keep it from being too stark. I love the color. When I got the dye set and everything washed proper I kept touching the fabric. I just wanted to wrap myself up in that color!

What I don't have pictured here are the pinot. Each corner has a square of a white velvet, taken from a decommissioned Torah cover. Since that fabric has absorbed so much holiness and positive intention, it seems proper to find it new homes in ritual objects.

Rowan's tallit - in progress

My friends Rowan and Tyler each commissioned a tallit from me recently. They're both into blues and greens, saturated colors, and nature. Tyler's is going to have tree branches and leaves in a big pattern, and Rowan's will have the seven species (wheat, barley, grapes, dates, figs, pomegranates, and olives!) painted as though they were growing in a garden. I've gotten to work on the painting, so here's a little glimpse:

The first picture is the beginning of establishing the background. I wanted to evoke the look that you get when you take a picture of the sky and the sun glare appears as a cool, geometric white glow. The second one shows wheat and barley arcing up towards the sun, with the background blue and white swirls that make up the background (those are block printed, while the rest is painted).

Darning Socks

I really like socks. Like, really really really like socks. They're always on the top of my wishlist at holidays, and I get attached to the ones with cool patterns, especially the smartwool ones. I have a whole bunch that are on the verge of falling apart, so I decided it was time to learn how to fix them.

I had a pretty decent idea of what that would entail, but I still looked to the internet for guidance. I learned that a lot of people call it darning when they just sew the hole in the sock shut by pulling either side together. I think that's a questionable choice when it comes to socks. First off, it'll result in misshapen socks. On top of that, it introduces a seam to a high-wear area. Seams in socks aren't comfortable anywhere, let alone right at the heel. What I wanted to do was to reweave the area that was missing and fully integrate it into the surrounding fabric.

I started out with a sock that had almost worn through. I could've waited for it to really be a hole, but this worked too.

I stretched it over a glass jar because I don't have a darning egg. Socks are stretched quite a bit when you wear them, so you want to design and execute your repair in a way that takes that into consideration, so a darning egg or a jar or whatever will keep it appropriately stretched while you work.

The first step is to grab a darning needle and some wool yarn that is around the same thickness as the stuff the sock is made of and stitch a big square around the hole. Don't knot the end of the yarn. You want it to be big enough to include a decent section of intact fabric on all sides of the hole. From there you stitch columns up and down all the way across the square. Next, you stitch the rows. When you reach the area over the hole, it'll be covered in a bunch of vertical threads from having done the columns. You want to weave your rows through, over-under-over-under (then, for the next row, under-over-under-over, etc. etc. ad nauseam). This creates a woven fabric that fills out the hole. 

When you're done, do a few extra stitches around the edge and cut the yarn without knotting it. The extra stitches will guard against your thread pulling out from the patch. You would be able to feel a knot, and that would be unpleasant, so they're best avoided. Because it's wool, it will with use felt together and otherwise cling to itself to form a cohesive fabric. Just be sure to wash it on cold and hang dry. All fixed!

Quick Quilts and Knitting

These quilts are a couple years old, and were made in under a week each. The first one is particularly on my mind of late. I really like it, and I have some smaller eight-pointed stars made out of the same fabrics that I want to incorporate in my next quilt. It's lap-sized.

This next one I put together real quick when I moved into my first apartment and for the first time in my life had a bed that wasn't twin-sized. You can see a little bit of a green-gold-white batik in the upper right corner. Each corner had a big star that used some batik fabric that a friend brought back after spending a summer in Africa.

The knittings just extra. The shawl I made forever ago. The mittens are my most recent finished projects. I'd never had mittens before, and I've found that I do like them. Now that it's chilly, I wear them on my way to and from the train for my work commute.

Tallit

This year, even though I was on a deadline making the High Holidays Torah mantles for my shul and busy coordinating some HH details and writing a little talk, I made a new tallit. It was compulsive. I gave myself a reasonable excuse: my original tallit, made from a piece of woven fabric a friend brought me after she visited her sister in Kenya, is one of the big shawl-type tallitot. Rosh Hashanah was sure to be hot, so clearly I needed a smaller tallit to help me deal with the heat.

I had an idea for what I wanted. I'm a sucker for night sky imagery, so it was going to have stars and the moon. I wanted it to be a little on the Starry Night side of things. I was going to combine sewing, painting, and printing, and it needed to be done with only the fabric I had on hand since there really wasn't time for a fabric expedition.

I gathered some fabric, carved one more swirly block to add to my collection, and got going. I stitched stuff together, added background color, and painted in the stars and the moon.

 Then I printed swirls over everything.

After that I added the atarah (neckband) and pinot (corner pieces).

The verse on the atarah is from the psalms. I'm still torn on whether it should be in English or in Hebrew. Since it so directly relates to the pattern and painting, I wanted people to be able to understand it. At the same time, I love Hebrew, and I feel like it always loses something in translation. I guess I could've put both on it, but for now, it'll stay English.

The last step was to tie the tzitzit. The corner pieces are hard to see here, but they're printed with a compass symbol because your tzitzit are supposed to help keep you from going astray.

It was all finished up in time for services, and it was a fun project. I'd love to make more, but I want them to be made intentionally and with a collaborative process so that they fit together well and really suit people. Tallitot like this one need to add to your experience of prayer. They make it special, remind you of what you're doing, and give you something to fiddle with and focus on if your mind starts to wander off (tzitzit are great for fiddling with. I swear, between those and the motions folks use when davening, Judaism really sets you up with good outlets to expend any extra energy and redirect your mind and body to the task at hand).

Torah Cover I

This is my first ever Torah mantle. I designed it specifically for my congregation here in West Philly. The background is an abstracted view of a West Philadelphia row house to locate the image firmly in our community. The tree is a reference to the Tree of Life imagery, as the Torah is a tree of life for those who cling to it. I spelled out tree of life in Hebrew in the branches. It's pretty colorful and a lot more fun than the traditional mass-produced blue velvet ones with the gold embroidery. Because it's seen at so many services, it needs to be complicated enough to not get boring. I think I managed to achieve that!

And here it is on the actual Torah scroll:

Prints

I taught myself print-making this year. I carve linoleum blocks and print them entirely by hand, no press. I've recently started printing on fabric as well, but first I'll share some of the more traditional ink-on-paper prints that I've made.

I love both the process of carving out the blocks (and all of the mirror-writing it requires) and the ease of production. It would be quicker with a press, but even with my low-tech facilities, it's a whole lot quicker than quilting.