Before I show you pictures of my wall hanging, I wish to talk a little bit about the process of making it. First of all, remember that each and every stitch was sewn by hand,which takes much more time and patience than using a machine. (I don't like sewing machines because, at least when I use them, they seem to tangle/break as often as they work.) So by no means did this project come out perfect, but I also wasn't aiming for that. The hand-done look appeals to me.
Because the project was all hand-done, and I wanted it to look semi-perfect, it took me a very long time. First I hemmed a half-yard piece of brown print fabric all the way around. (You'll soon see that the wall hanging is a stylized garden scene.) Next, I got to work on the greenery, the step that took me longest. I sewed on 14 green print triangles for grass, and three tall strips for stems. Each stem has one jagged edge and one straight edge; the straight edge came from the edge of the fabric, and the jagged edge is where I cut.
Once the greenery was done, I turned to the main point of this project: purple flowers! Each flower has five petals. I tried to arrange them neatly; I think in the end, flower number one came out best and flower number two came out worst. In any case, my grandmother had let me pick out buttons for the centers, and I think they make the flowers really pop.
And now, here are pictures.
This is the first picture I took, when it had just occurred to me to document this process. You can see the border hem, the grass, and one flower stem.
And in this picture all the greenery is done! That's fourteen "grass blades" and three tall flower stems.
And...first flower finished! In terms of shape and petal arrangement, this is really the one that came out best.
This is the second flower, and even I will admit it: it did not come out very well at all.
And...the second flower again! I meant to photograph the third, and really thought I had...but it was late last night (I was pushing past bedtime to finish this project), and I guess I made a mistake. Oh well.
Here is a picture of the finished wall hanging laid out on the floor...
...and hanging on the wall above my dining room table.
Just for comparison's sake, I wish to show pictures of my two other wall hangings I made, both of which are much smaller and neither of which is a particular scene. This is the first one. The background is made of two gray handkerchief pieces sewn together (so the hem was already taken care of); the blue paisley Jewish star in the center is covering up a defect in the center seam, but also, what else would I put in the center? Each corner has a different scene going on.
This is actually the least involved of all the wall hangings I have made! I originally made it as a mizrach, a thingy to hang on my Eastern wall as a nice thing to face when I pray. However, East in the first room I had to hang this in turned out to be straight into a corner: not exactly the best place to hang something, so I hung it somewhere else. This apartment had a big blank space over the fireplace, so I hung both little wall hangings there. What's funny to me about this one is that I actually hung it upside down, but because all it is is a row of Jewish stars, no one can tell but me.
And now that I'm done with that tremendously involving wall hanging (yes, it was fun to make; I am not implying that it wasn't), I get to move on to meaningful Jewish projects! First I want to make myself enough tallitot k'tanot (holy undergarments with fringes) to phase out the plain white men's kind I wear during the week. (I will continue to wear the women's kind when I get dressed up, because they're already special and I need the more discrete neckline and shape.) At present I have fabric for one other. I think it is the ultimate fun fabric: purple with elephants and polka dots. My current Hannkah gift plan is fabric for four more sets--blue, brown, pink, and yellow--and the strings to go with them. It's really the price of strings that adds up fast, not the material.
After I finish the tallitot k'tanot in fun fabrics (which will take forever and a day; I don't get much time to sew now that I'm in school), I think I want to make myself an actual mizrach, because this apartment has an actual Eastern wall on which to hang it. I'm thinking blue background, green and brown shapes...we'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for commenting on my blog! Please no hate speech or inappropriate language. Please remember to be polite. Thank you!