Mateen e-mailed me on March 2 about getting a custom tallit for his Bar Mitzvah on August 5. During the next couple of weeks we exchanged a lot of e-mails, discussing colors and designs, and how design choices affect the price. He created several design drawings, took photos of them, and e-mailed them to me. This last week we nailed down the design.
We used his drawing as a starting point. Instead of having the three colors - black, red, and charcoal - as separate stripes, we decided to put them together to form a composite stripe, and then using two of these multi-color stripes at each end of the tallit, like this:
The corners will be red in the middle, edged by black. The text on the atarah will be the Shema.
I sent Mateen my work notes with a price estimate and asked him to show that to his parents for approval. (This is an important step in working with young people, because the parents are the ones paying the bill!)
I got approval from Mateen's mom, and now I am all set to start the work. I will make this tallit in June, to ship no later than the end of that month. I will chronicle the process on this blog page, with text and pictures, so that he can follow my progress, and so that other customers can get an idea of how I create a custom tallit.
May 22
For this tallit, I didn't need to do any fabric shopping. Today I pulled out the white, black, red, and charcoal dupioni silks and started cutting and pressing the pieces. My cat Kisu likes to supervise my work.
May 23
Cutting, pressing, and sewing stripes.
May 24
Starting the embroidery. I sketch the letters freehand onto the fabric with a white marking pencil, then follow the markings the best I can. This looks very different from machine embroidery. The machine sews on thousands of tiny stitches, and the result is like a computer printout. Here each letter is a little different, and the shapes and distances are not always perfect. I think of it as an impressionistic painting vs. a photograph.
The atarah is made.
May 27
Hemming the main piece of white dupioni silk...
... and attaching the atarah.
Sewing the stripes and corners on.
May 30
Pressing the finished piece.
And here are the tallit and bag, almost finished. Just need to make holes in the corners and tie the tzitzit.
Looks great! Can't wait to see how it turns out!
ReplyDelete-Mateen