Hatam Soferet

Image copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see larger version.

Image copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see larger version.

Image copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see larger version.

I’m dispatching it here because I liked the multimedia aspect. You can see the poem part is handwritten on paper, but then the paper is pasted to a satin frame, and the join is covered by fabric leaves and ribbon roses.

Note how the leaves have held their green colour but the roses, once red or pink, have faded almost beyond recognition. Lightfast red dyes were jolly hard to do before advances in chemistry in the nineteenth century.

Anyway, something to consider for you fabric artists.

The call number’s nsh2, from drawer 4 again.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Thing about being an artist: you make stuff, and you make more stuff, and sometimes you don’t have space for some of the stuff any more.

On sale: Alef-bets; papercuts; Tefillin Barbie.

Struck-out items=claimed already

Bibbly-bobbly alef-bets

The boyfriend works on glioblastoma. Which is a cancer that happens to astrocytes, so he says. giantmicrobes.com has neurons, but not astrocytes, so I made a plush astrocyte. With a wire skeleton so that all its tentacles are posable, because who wants a non-posable astrocyte, really?

It’s purple because all the pictures of glioblastoma are purple.

Look, cute little tail!

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The hardest part was getting the braid around the outside right. I wanted it to be just one line, going round and round, but if you just run a sinewave around the edge, you get either two or four lines, and I very much wanted only one line, because I only wanted to have the one text in the border.

It frustrates me no end that I no longer have the mathematical vocabulary to articulate the problem and thus find the solution easily. I contemplated asking a certain chap I know who works with knot theory, but didn’t want to admit defeat, and eventually figured it out the painful way, by drawing it on squared paper.

If you look carefully, you can see that there are eleven troughs along the top border but only ten along the bottom border. This is because a one-strand braid works if your border isn’t a whole number of wavelengths but is something-and-a-half wavelengths. The easiest way to do that is remove one of the troughs on one of the short edges and stretch the others a bit to make up for it – you could say, ok, the border is 100cm and the wavelength is about 4cm which would come out to 25 phases so let’s make it 24.5 okay divide 100 by 24.5 that’s 4.08 rightio let’s make the wavelength 4.08cm and figure out how to centre that so that the side borders are level with each other…but that’s very tiresome, so I didn’t bother.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

I like a bit of a challenge now and again.

Here’s a community that wants to honour its rabbi by giving him a piece of artwork.

Since the rabbi is well-beloved by the families with children, the Surprise Committee wanted to have the children participate in creating the artwork.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually result in something you want to frame and hang on the wall.

Enter a fun, bubbly style of calligraphy. These letters are outlined with marker, and they’re intentionally idiosyncratic. The children can help colour the letters in, and if they overshoot the edges, the outlines can just be thickened to compensate, and it’ll still look fine because it’s designed that way. Each letter can have several colours, increasing the number of possible identifiable contributions.

I provided the calligraphy, as an ex-member of the community. I left a lot of room around the edge; a current member of the community provided the border, in much the same style.

Then the community had a Making The Surprise day, and they made the surprise, and here it is:

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

This Purim, I was commissioned to write a megillah for the Abramson Center for Jewish Life, and not just create a megillah, but also a case for it to live in. The Center’s rabbi asked if I could make a design that drew on the Center’s existing artwork, and that’s what you see above.

The Abramson Center has stained-glass windows by the artist Mordechai Rosenstein. I used elements from the Book of Numbers window, pictured here.

Why Numbers? Well, the book of Esther is quite interested in numbers, have you ever noticed? Listen up when you hear it this year – you’ll see. Also, in Numbers, the Israelites complain about המן, which is part of the Purim narrative also.

More seriously, the Shabbat before Purim is known as Shabbat Zachor, because it is on this Shabbat that we remember what Amalek did to the Israelites in the wilderness. The Amalek story is also brought up in the Book of Numbers, in Balaam’s oracle: Amalek was the first among the nations, but its end is utter destruction – and the future of Amalek is (albeit obscurely) what the Purim story is about.

So it is appropriate that the Megillah case draws its colouring and background elements, these energetic stripes of oranges, green, and purple, with white accents, from the Book of Numbers window.

The letters are inspired by another Mordechai Rosenstein piece at the Abramson Center, pictured here, where they spell out והדרת פני זקן – honour the elderly.

What are the letters on the Megillah case spelling out?

The Numbers window depicts an amphora, and on Purim an amphora means one thing – wine. The rabbinic dictum is that one should drink עד דלא ידע – until he can no longer distinguish between “Blessed be Mordechai” and “Cursed be Haman.”

The Megillah case takes the words ברוך מרדכי and ארור המן, and adds the pairing “Blessed be Esther” and “Cursed be Zeresh” from the piyut Shoshanat Yaakov – and then mixes all the letters up, all over the case, until it’s all jumbled and scrambled and עד דלא ידע indeed.

The word translated “honour,” above, has the Hebrew root הדר, which we know in another context, הידר מצוה – hidur mitzvah, beautifying or honouring a mitzvah. This Megillah and its case were donated in memory of Eugene Winston, by Ira, Flaura, Andrew, and Zachary Winston, and they will have the satisfaction every year of knowing that the Center’s Megillah reading is beautified in Eugene’s honour. We wish them joy.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Girl-shaped tallit katan

Wearing tzitzit under your clothes isn’t just something men do, but commercially-available tallitot katanot are definitely man-shaped. Bring a strappy top and come learn how to make a tallit katan that fits your body. Sewing skills not necessary.

Basically we’re going to go through the steps detailed in Danya’s classic post: take a strappy top, turn it into a four-cornered garment by removing stitches, make holes in it, and attach tzitzit.

(Translation for speakers of American English: strappy top is what you call a tank top.)

We’re assuming that you want to wear tzitzit, and that you’ve got over your “but that’s a MAN’s thing!!!” wibbles. People are welcome to discuss their wibbles, but that’s not the focus of the session, so I’m not providing sources on that here. Email me if you want sources.

Strappy top: fits under girl clothes, and is not a man’s garment.

Now, the Mishnah Berurah (16:1) says that the shoulder parts should be wide, and davka shouldn’t be straps: ויעשה הכתפים של הטלית-קטן רחבים כדי שיהיו נכרים ויהיה עליהם תורת בגד ולא שם רצועות. He seems to be saying that anything with shoulder-straps is not a garment and therefore doesn’t qualify for tzitzit. I rather think that, certainly in women’s clothing, the statements is a garment and has shoulder straps are not mutually exclusive, and therefore it’s probably okay to make a girl tallit katan out of a strappy top.

So, strappy top.

• I don’t believe you can buy wool/linen blend strappy tops, but just in case: don’t buy a wool/linen blend.
• Some say you shouldn’t put tzitzit on cotton or certain types of synthetics; if you’re of that camp, buy a mostly-wool top (Good luck with that. You might have to make one). If you’re not of that camp, go right ahead with your cotton or synthetic top. If you’re not sure, ask your rabbi or your google or read this and make a decision that’s consonant with your other values.
• Some say there’s a minimum size for a tallit katan. Others don’t. Women’s clothes are generally smaller than men’s clothes; compare childrens’ sizes of tallit katan, which apparently hold that it’s all relative to the body size. You might care to find out which way your community holds on the minimum size for a woman’s tallit katan.

Turning into four-cornered garment: slitting the seams 51% up the side.

• The straps don’t count as part of the 51% reckoning.
• Either rip the stitches or just CHOP THEM ALL OFF, WAHEY.
• Optional sewing part: hemming the edges and putting in a few stitches to stop the seam tearing any further.

Reinforcing the corners:

• With sewing, like a buttonhole, to stop the holes ripping open.
• If the holes rip open, it’s still ok to wear, but it’s shvach.
• I find that the armpit part goes yucky long before the corners start ripping, so I tend to skip this step. Then again, if I wore the tzitzis hanging out more often, they’d catch on things, in which case reinforced corners would be a good idea.
• You can also reinforce the corners with awesome things like a certain JTS rabbi does.

Cutting holes:

• They’re supposed to be two etzbaot from each side. 5cm gives you a bit extra to allow for stretching and such.

Tying tzitzit:

• There are about a billion squillion explanatory videos, blog posts, photos and websites out there explaining how to do it. Here’s the Jewish Catalog version.
• When pulling halakha off the internet, often a good idea to compare several independent sources and make sure they’re all saying the same thing.
• Remember to say leshem mitzvat tzitzit, that you’re doing this for the purpose of the mitzvah of tzitzit.

Girl Clothing:

• There is a stringency to have the tzitzit be the same colour as the garment, but Ashkenazim (dunno about non-Ashkenazim) don’t bother with it any more. Still, girls’ clothes tend to be colour-co-ordinated, so if you like dyeing things, you might consider it, like this Hadar fellow has.

The order’s important. First make the four corners, then attach the tzitzit. Not the other way round.

On wearing them – depending how you view womanhood and tallit katan and the intersection of same, you may or may not want to be making a bracha when you put the things on. Again, ask your rabbi, ask your google, ask your friends.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

I may have spent the evening putting artwork onto mugs. Click mug images to buy at Zazzle.

My cup runneth over: This one’s particularly fine, I think, for hot drinks on chilly Shabbat afternoons at seudah shelishit, when people are singing “kosi revaya” anyway. Also good for people like me who tend to overfill their teacups from an excess of enthusiasm.

Aleph and A: These are just pretty. I also have reish and shin, but not other letters. Maybe if someone were to ask nicely for a particular letter, I could do it.

Procrastination: Because I totally am, and so are you.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.