elettaria

For those who don't know, I've been busy over the last few weeks creating a tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. About half the women in my community (a Liberal one) wear them, but it's a relatively new thing for women. It was completed last week, and it had its inaugural wearing at the Shabbat morning service on Saturday, where I said a shechechiyanu for the occasion (and where it was duly admired, naturally). It's linen embroidered with cotton, and isn't usually so rumpled-looking but I've been throwing it about while I got the measurements right for the tallit bag. I spent about two and a half weeks solidly working on it, frequently for a very large part of the day (work avoidance). Embroidery is definitely therapeutic, although my eyes may not think so. The text across the top is the blessing you say when putting on a tallit, and the names on the corners are the names of the four matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, which there is a tradition of putting on women's tallitot.

The tallit bag isn't quite finished, I need to get my mother to tell me the secrets of putting in a concealed zip, but that's all that's left. You can't quite see the colours on it, but it's navy velvet embroidered in various shades of light blue shading to off-white and some silver.

Enormous thanks to

elfbystarlight, who has been my advisor throughout the project and put up with late-night phonecalls when I'm yelping, "What do I do, it's shrunk?"

I'm now turning into the community embroiderer, and will hopefully be creating a cover for the torah scroll, as well as cloths to put above and beneath it in lieu of an ark. I'm still working out basic designs at the moment, but all suggestions and comments are welcome.

cross-posted to