Tallit Commission: A Time for Machine Embroidery

Here's my latest commission, and although I live in California, and the client lives in the southeast USA, it was made with help from one of the best Judaica machine embroiderers on the planet, Marilyn Levy of Ontario, Canada. It's a tallit (prayer shawl) for a young man's bar mitzvah. 

Like all my commissions, this one started out with a  discussion with the young man's family. They wanted cotton, with a leafy design, in blue and grey, so I drew up choices.

They liked #1 best, the simple vines. What was most unusual - and why they needed a custom tallit instead of one off the rack - was that they wanted Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 on the atarah, the long rectangular band that marks the collar.

You know this verse: it begins, "To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven." 

An atarah is optional - store-bought shawls sometimes carry the embroidered prayer for donning it. But I've never seen one with this particular verse. 

Initially, the family hoped we could fit in the entire verse, which is a long paragraph. They wanted the letters big enough to read from a distance. I make a sketch to show them what this might look like. 

That convinced them that just the first line might be better. They wanted it in Hebrew and English. I told them I could only do this job if I brought in a subcontractor. I contacted my friend Marilyn Levy, a.k.a. "the TALLITmaaven," who graciously agreed to help. So now we had a three-way, international collaboration, with the family telling us what they wanted, Marilyn showing us what's possible in embroidery, and me getting everyone on the same page and doing the construction.

After much back and forth, here's a printout of Marilyn's design; the family was happy with the size and fonts she chose. (The straight lines help with placement; it's not part of the design.) Full size it was about 22" long.

I printed it out onto paper, cut out the lettering area and taped the two pieces together. I used that long paper strip to block out the area of the tallit where it would lie, and started sewing the other elements in place around it, while waiting for Marilyn to finish the fabric version. 

Marilyn did a gorgeous, flawless job with the atarah, as I knew she would. 

A little closer: 

She also embroidered the boy's name a few times, so I was able to cut those out and place them inside the tallit, inside a kippah (hat), and inside the quilted tallit case I made to hold everything. Here's the front of the case. The secret to quilting those lines so straight....

....was that I used my walking foot to quilt it from the reverse side, a star print, following the lines of the stars in three directions. Below you can see the print under the top flap. Lower down, the silver thread that shows against the blue was in the bobbin. One of the name tags is on the lower left (I blurred the name for this post.) 

I also made a pair of kippot with the same blue fabric, with grey binding.

The one on the left is reversible, but the other one, not so much, because of where the name tag went, as you can see below. (I didn't want to set the name lower, fearing it would interfere with the fit.) The hat pattern is from my book, The Uncommon Yarmulke (sold in my etsy shop at https://www.etsy.com/shop/CathyPStudio.) I used the "large, 4-panel" pattern on p. 19, which fits most teens and adults.

On the tallit, I freehand machine stitched veins on the leaves, and 6-pointed stars on the "pinot" (corner squares), with silver metallic thread. The leaves contain Decor Bond, a midweight fusible interfacing, which  gave them a bit of depth and stabilized them for embroidery. There's also Decor Bond backing the corner squares, which makes them strong for their duties holding a satin stitched buttonhole to surround the tzitzit, the ritual macrame strands, in place.

Like so many commissions, this one was not without its moment of terror. Marilyn put the package with the atarah and name labels into the mail, and headed off on vacation. After a week, the package vanished from the tracking system. I couldn't find it in the Canadian or the US mail. It didn't turn up on its due date, a Friday. My incoming US mail alerts showed no sign of it.

I lay awake that night, imagining the worst. What if it never showed? What if I had to do the embroidery myself, by hand? I decided to give hand embroidery a shot, just for my peace of mind. I spent the weekend doing the best hand embroidery I could possibly do, using Marilyn's paper printout as my model. Here's the result.

The closer you get, the messier it looks. This: 

Versus this: 

The handmade version is charming and might work for a compassionate blood relative; but it's not a job for a client. 

Thankfully, on Monday, Marilyn's atarah appeared, seemingly out of nowhere (according to two country's tracking systems).  I was thrilled with it.

The tallit and its accessories reached the family with plenty of time to spare. But you know how you sometimes find yourself buying fabric for the last quilt you finished? That's what sort of happened to me after this project. 

In this case, I started looking at embroidery machines, thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could do this?" 

And then I answered myself. Machine embroidery is a complicated hobby and/or business. The cost and complexity of an embroidery machine is just the beginning. 

Then there's the knowledge, skill, time, and money required for acquiring and understanding lots of software; designing, sizing, adjusting, stabilizing, hooping and rehooping required for large, complicated designs including bilingual Bible verses on atarahs; not to mention mountains of threads you have to buy, and thread changes you must perform. Most of these things are so clearly not my strengths. But partnering with Marilyn who loves all this and does it so well - that was my idea of fun! 

I also vowed to learn a little more about hand-embroidery. I enjoyed doing it, even if the results were not suitable for formal occasions. I do wonder if flawless hand-embroidered  lettering - especially Hebrew lettering - in a reasonable amount of time is possible. If you've done it, I'd love to see and hear about your approach! 

To learn more about Marilyn's gorgeous Judaica, go to her website, http://www.tallitmaaven.com/. More examples of my (mostly not machine embroidered) tallitot and their backstories are on my Judaiquilt.com website, at http://judaiquilt.com/Tallit_Gallery.html. 

A Pieced Prayer Scarf by Any Other Name (Quilt, Tallit, Stole) is Just As Sweet

I've made many Jewish prayer shawls (aka tallit) during my time as a quilter. Prayer shawls are usually what quilters would classify as applique projects: Stitch a design to the front (or not), decide whether you want a lining, a collar rectangle, stripes, or corner squares, and you're almost done. (Few people want batting). They can be as simple as one  piece of fabric (like the spectacular hand-painted fabric below, made by quilter Ricky Tims, modelled by my DH, with my Mom looking on:)

...to a simple background white background with the stripe and lining fabric selected by the client:

...to a more intricate cutout - this one's made from six shades of hand-dyed cotton....

...and this one's in dupioni silk...

...to something really complex involving photographs and piecing, like this tallit for my son, with NASA space photography...

...and this one for another young man, a Beatles and rock guitarist, modeled by my DD...

....guitar photos served as stripes. (The whole story).

Once you've done the appliqueing/piecing/stitching, all that remains is tying a fringe - called tzittzit- in the corners.

I've made so many tallitot (the plural), that you can imagine how excited I was to get an assignment from a different religion!

My friend Marian Sunabe attends the historic Evergreen Baptist Church in Los Angeles, founded by the  Japanese-American community in 1925. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a notice of eviction was posted by the government on the church's door - and many of their members were shipped to internment camps in remote, harsh locations. Sensitivity to this shameful episode made this church outspoken during the Civil Rights era and to this day, as it serves a diverse Asian-American community.

A happy occasion was coming up this summer: installation of their new pastor Jason, a delightful person, who is also one of my Artist Trading Card swap partners. (He made me a lovely woodburned tree ATC a couple of years ago, here.)

Marian asked me if I would help her make what she called a "stole" - a word I always associated with last-century mink neck wraps worn by my elderly relatives! But as it turned out, a stole is just a variation of a tallit!

The downside was that they needed it soon, I was about to go on vacation. I would be returning home on Friday, and the installation was Sunday. Marian was rightfully anxious, but I wasn't - barring flight delays, and with a little preparation, I knew that we could churn it out in an afternoon.

Jason wanted historic photos on his tallit, er, stole, and I was out of pretreated photo fabric sheets (my favorites are favorite EQ Printables Cotton Satin sheets), so I asked Marian to buy a bunch. I was expecting her to come back with a pack of flat sheets, but she bought this:

It's an 8.5" x 100" roll of Blumenthal Crafter's Images PhotoFabric, cotton poplin. It runs about $25. I'd never used this product, but it worked out very well. You have to cut the 120" roll down to the size you need - in this case, 8.5" x 11" sheets to feed into the printer.

The stole would need to be 92" long - far longer than my longest tallit (they usually run about 70") - and merely 5" wide - way narrower than any tallit I'd ever made. So I sized the photos to 4.75" square (to fit two on a page), and printed them onto the fabric sheets. Here are some of the historic images Jason wanted on the scarf. First, the civil order removing Japanese Americans from their homes.

Next, a harrowing image of the Japanese community lining up for trains to the camps, an image which resonates so deeply with me as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, 

This picture of Sunday School at an internment camp,

 The American flag flying high over the Manzanar camp, an iconic Federal government photo:

 A Christmas image from an internment camp:

Having lived in Tokyo, I've always felt the Japanese and the Jews had a great deal in common - but this project, and specifically the photos - really brought home how much, in America, a history of discrimination unites us.

I arranged the photos two to a page in my graphic design program (CorelDraw, but you could do it in Word), and then printed them out onto the Blumenthal sheets, before I left on vacation. Marian also brought over a stack of  glorious Japanese fabrics - most from vintage kimono - that one of the congregants donated to the project. OMG I was in love. We made a tentative plan.

The trip went fine, we returned Friday night, and Saturday afternoon we set to work. We had already cut one piece of grey/blue kimono fabric to serve as the lining - 93" x 5 1/2". We lay that on the floor as our template. Then we arranged the images and fabric strips on top of it. Marian is a gifted artist with an incredible eye - her medium of choice is usually collage, paint and paper - so I put her in charge of deciding which fabrics to use where. She was the art director, I was the technical consultant.

Marian came up with the color scheme, dark navy with shots of burgundy-reddish-purple - so elegant in subdued, spectacular Japanese prints and wovens.

It probably took us about 4 hours. Once the top strip was stitched together, we pinned it right sides  together against the backing, sewed all the way around with a quarter-inch seam allowance, leaving a turning hole of 5" along one edge.

Then we turned the whole thing to the right side, pressed it, and did a topstitch all the way around the edges. The sun was still up when Marian modeled the results. 

She sent me pictures from the installation ceremony the next day: 

What could be sweeter?

Joy-wise, it's not a whit different from what I see in bar and bat mitzvah pictures, when children are presented with their prayer shawls, we all think deeply about tradition and history....

   Good heavens, I love my life!

"Sew Jewish" Book Review

One thing I love about Jewish tradition is that it requires plenty of textiles. Important occasions are marked not only with prayer, gratitude, and (usually) food, but also fabric creations. These include:

•      Marriage - the ceremony requires a chuppah, a wedding canopy, 
•      Bar or Bat Mitzvah - the child needs a tallit, a prayer shawl; people need kippot, headcoverings,
•       Sabbath, aka Shabbat, which comes every week - the challah bread wants its own little bedcover,
•      Passover - The ceremonial matzoh cracker needs a cover; the people need theme pillows and kippot,

...And much, much more! I won't even describe here the fibrous imperatives of  Rosh Hashanah,  Purim, Sukkoth or Chanukah - but  they are surprisingly compelling once you start thinking this way!

Today, one of the most significant gathering places for like-minded people is the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework, a nonprofit organization approaching its 40th year. Members include quilters, needlepointers, embroiderers, knitters, weavers, beadworkers - you name it. All skill levels are welcome. (Learn more here.)

And one of the most exciting new voices in the world of fibrous Judaica design is Maria Bywater of Hudson Valley, N.Y. Maria is a professional huppah-maker, who rents out wedding canopies at huppahs.com, and blogs at SewJewish.com. She recently sent me a complementary copy of her book, "Sew Jewish."

The book is geared to beginners on up. Most of the 18 projects are not quilts, but they draw on the same basic sewing techniques. They cover the Jewish lifecycle and calendar: 

• For weddings, she offers not only simple chuppah directions, but also a bridal veil, kippot, tallit, tallit bag, and teffilin bag.
• For Shabbat, there's a challah cover, and, when Shabbat ends, a havdalah ritual spice pouch. 
• For Chanukah, there are directions for a dreidel (spinning top) game kit, complete with cut-out labels that explain how the game works. 
• For Purim, there are bright and cheerful mishloach manot gift containers.
• For Passover, a matzoh cover, and handwashing towel.
• I especially like her detailed prayer shawl pattern/instructions, which answers all the questions beginners and beyond have been asking me for years about construction. 
• For the home, there's a pattern for a mezuzah case; a tzedakah (charity) jar wrap; a mizrah (which marks the Eastern wall); a "Shalom" pillow; and an aleph-bet (Hebrew alphabet) cuddle blanket, and this lovely, whimsical hamsa (a hand-shaped good luck wall hanging): 

The book is clear and beautifully illustrated, There's an entire chapter that covers the most basic stitching concepts. 

Find it  on Maria's Etsy shop or Amazon,  in paperback or downloadable PDF.  The Etsy site also sells more tallit collar patterns, and a different hamsa wall hanging than the one in the book. (No financial affiliation with any of this!)

I am thinking that this book would be a terrific present for a teen, especially a bar or bat mitzvah who is interested in sewing; for newlyweds; for people who are celebrating conversion; for new retirees; and for anyone who wants to sew and is interested in Jewish heritage and ritual. I also think it's a must-have for synagogue and Jewish school libraries. Maria, yasher koach, well done! 

Interested in seeing more Judaica? Go to Pomegranateguild.org, and also check out my own Judaiquilt.com website. 

           

The Kids Are All Right, with an Appliqued Rock and Roll Prayer Shawl

For me, the most fun thing in the world is making a custom quilt, prayer shawl (tallit), and/or wedding canopy (chuppah). This is the story of an appliqued and pieced prayer shawl I just finished for a 13-year-old who I still haven't met or talked to. It was a wild and wonderful trip from beginning to end. Specifically, a trip on a Yellow Submarine.

I was contacted by the father of the Bar Mitzvah boy in early July. They live maybe a half hour away and found my Judaiquilt.com custom tallitot. The father wanted to surprise his son with a British rock & roll and electric guitar-theme prayer shawl.

Brilliant, as they say in England! I was thrilled! But there was bad news: The event was in early August, I had a one-week vacation plus a complex commissioned chuppah (wedding canopy) due at the same time. I almost said turned him down - but gee, he was such a lovely person, and how the heck could I resist the theme?

His initial vision included a British flag on the tallit, large enough and centered so that it might actually enwrap his son,

(When I told my husband about this, he was ecstatic; with his encyclopedic memory for classic rock and roll trivia, he immediately demanded that I look up the following album cover and put it on the tallit: 

.)

Right about now, you're probably wondering whether a British Rock and Roll tallit is kosher. My client told me right off the bat that he'd described his vision to his rabbi, who replied that anything that gets a kid to wear a tallit is kosher, even dissipated rockers. The rabbi didn't specifically agree to the use of sleeping/stoned members of The Who, but he did agree to my client's desire to use logos like these: 

Is that a gender symbol?

Is tongue a Jewish food?

The Hindenburg wasn't exactly Jewish.

As in Esther?

Happy New Year!

He also wanted guitar manufacturer logos, like these: 

And more. The candidate images multiplied. But wait, back to the first problem - where was I going to find a British flag fabric? I found nothing in online quilt shops, so I posted inquiries on my chat groups. Quilters sent all kinds of interesting suggestions - one directed me to a specialty British boutique, where I could order bubble and squeak with my genuine UK flag.

Not all my cyber-correspondents were enthusiastic. One fretted that Brits might feel that a flag on a prayer shawl is disrespectful towards the flag. (I told her I thought the opposite was just as likely - some Jews might find a British flag disrespectful to a prayer shawl?) 

(But then she looked up British rules regarding their flags, and it turns out the they are a lot less particular with what you do with their flag than Americans. [Brits don't seem to mind if it touches the floor]. Phew!!!! I'd hate to have all the local Jewish Brits storm out of the Temple when the tallit came in, or vice versa.) 

Several people sent me to Spoonflower.com, a custom-fabric making site that I knew about but hadn't checked yet. Sure enough, I found several variations on a British flag, printed onto cotton, like this one and this one. I sent my clients over to look at them, and this launched him on his own Spoonflower scavenger hunt. He fell out of love with the British flag fabric, and fell into love with:  

...a wonderful Beatles fabric that the artist calls "She Loves You". It even includes little UK flags as you can plainly see. 

He also loved this fabric:  

(Buy here)

And then he wandered over to ebay, and found this:  

It was a yard long, inexplicably 17 inches wide strip. It's a long out-of-print commercially manufactured Beatles novelty fabric. I happened to  have some other fabrics from this same collection, including a Yellow Submarine fabric (we'll get to that).

I wasn't sure those looked good together, but I imported thumbnails into my drawing program and started playing around with layouts. (The small circles and squares, including those in the corners, represent the guitar company and rock band logos):

Any variation on these four designs would be quick to sew up and we'd meet the deadline easily. I wasn't happy that the fabrics didn't really go together in variation 1 - but time was ticking. 

 But then, on July 19, I got a new email from my client. Attached to the email were images of not 1, not 2, but 18 electric guitars. 

I won't show you all 18.  He wrote, "I thought maybe you could randomly intersperse small pics of these different guitars. ...[T]he funny thing is that [my son] can actually identify each of these guitars instantly.  The kid is obsessed with guitars.  It would probably be a lot of work too, but let me know what you think."

Now I panicked!! Shalommmmmmm. I strove to breathe deeply. My top priority is to make the bar mitzvah boy happy. But do you have any idea how much time it would take to transfer all those guitars to fabric and then stitch each one to the background? Not to mention expense. I use Electric Quilt brand premium cotton satin photo transfer sheets - it's pricey, and with all the other images he wanted - at this point we were up to 28 photo transfers  -  I might have to buy extra packs that I hadn't factored into my expenses. But mostly the issue was where in the world to fit all those images and fabrics.

On the other hand, I visually adored those 18 guitars...an idea popped into my head that I couldn't shake: Use the guitars as stripes. So we culled the number of favorites down to 12.  

My client also made an excellent decision that strewing guitar company logos all over the tallit made it look kinda like an advertising page from Guitar Player magazine.  So all those logos were out. 

On one visit, I showed him my Yellow Submarine fabric. He decided he wanted to use that as the atarah (collar.)

Plus, at the last minute, he wanted photos of his son playing the electric guitar on both the tallit and the bag. 

Wait, one last request before I started sewing: the guitars in the stripes should be properly aligned, with the the necks pointing to the wearer's left hand. 

And he needed reassurance that the stripes would be precisely straight. 

I won't go into too  many more details. Suffice it to say that I accidentally discovered that putting a dark blue  frame around the novelty fabrics and printed guitars brought the diverse fabrics together and gave the tallit a more traditional/polished look. My client agreed. Here's what we wound up with (modelled by my 15-year- old before delivery. She plays acoustic guitar.)

Here's the back, and some of the lining. 

When we received the fabric from Spoonflower, both of us were surprised that the guitars were so big. But that was okay - they're dramatic! 

The photo of his son is on the lining, as you can see above.

 We decided to put band logos in the four corners. The guitars are printed onto fabric and pieced between the blue strips.

 Here's the atarah, made from my Yellow Submarine fabric. 

We ended up not fitting the fat quarter of 'She Loves You' onto the tallit. So we decided to use it for the bag instead.  I make my tallit bags quilted, envelope style. The front of the bag has a vintage button with a peace symbol bead glued on. I put a horizontal guitar on the flap so the young man can play air guitar when services start to drag. 

On the back of the bag, lower right, I worked in the other photo of the young man. It fits right in. 

We bought colorful blue-and-gold nylon tzitzyot (ritual fringe) from a truly groovy vendor my client  discovered in this Etsy shop. To my astonishment, the tzitzyot came pre-tied - it never occurred to me that this could work! (You just loop the top loop through the hole and pull the knotted part through the loop - duh!). This saved me a lot of time, which I was able to spend on other things like precision-measuring the stripes. 

In the the end, it took us 80, yes, eight-oh emails and at least three studio visits, but we finished, with time to spare. Despite the twists and turns - or maybe because of them - I loved the process. The results were way better than if either of us had worked alone. The better I got to know my client, the more  I realized the force is strong with this one - with his creativity, zest, newfound love of fabric, and yes, his pickiness, he had all the characteristics of a fine quilter - I recommended he start quilting immediately. It's never too early to start on his son's high-school-graduation tee-shirt quilt. 

The whole family was thrilled with the tallit. It never in a million years would have occurred to me to make a British rock and roll tallit, but thanks to my client's and his son's passion. I can now check this off my bucket list. And I am grateful. Now I'm just waiting for someone to ask me for a Tardis Tallit! 

Want to make your own tallit? Here's my web page with more details and a free Hebrew prayer atarah pattern. Want my help? Contact me! 

UPDATE: My client read this blog post and wrote this: "Thank you again for making this very special gift happen.  It was a labor of love for me (even though you did all the work!) and my son has told me that it is the nicest gift he's ever gotten. He's only had the opportunity to wear it once since his Bar Mitzvah, but he got rave reviews! Everybody loves it! I can't wait for him to wear it during high holy day services next month." 

I love happy endings! My client is being modest - he did a lot of the deciding, which is always the hardest part!