I am keeping this project as a wiki rather than as a series of blog postings or notes to myself. Accordingly, it will be perpetually in draft until I add the photos of the finished item.

From the time I bought my good loom in 2000, I knew I wanted to weave my daughter’s tallit when the time came for her bat mitzvah observance.

I mulled over the four basic yarn groups I was willing to weave into a tallit: wool, linen, cotton, and silk. (My old nicknames, “Nay-sayer of Nylon,” “Pooh-pooher of Polyester,” and “Spurner of Spandex” gained an additional dimension of relevance.) I did my homework on what was and was not permitted for a tallit. This meant wading through a Nile delta’s worth of minhag in order to find my way to the current of halachah under and behind it all.

My daughter eventually told me what was important to her in a tallit. She wanted it to have brightly colored stripes that I had dyed myself. Since from the beginning my idea about this tallit had been influenced by a desire to weave a B'nai Aur tallit, this fit right in with my ideas. We talked about the dyestuffs available to me, and she wanted me to use the natural ones I typically use in my other projects rather than the commercial chemical ones. That narrowed my field of yarns down to silk and wool, both of which I have lots of experience dyeing with natural dyes.

The current version of reality looks like this. It’s a shawl-type rectangle somewhere between 18” and 24” wide by about 6’ or 7’ long, depending on the proportions I decide to go with. It’s white in a silk-wool blend, with stripes in three colors. I will hand-dye the yarn for the stripes using natural dyes. The reinforcements for the tzitzit will be white silk damask, harvested from her grandfather’s bar mitzvah tallit dating to the 1930s. (The rest of the tallit is in tatters, but the reinforcement squares look almost brand new. Since he never lived to see his only grandchild, we thought this was a good way to involve him.) We will tie the tzitzit ourselves, and hopefully be able to acquire a set of tekhelet fringes to do so. I’d prefer it if we could dye our own, but I’m having trouble getting ahold of the one place I know that sells the tekhelet dye kits.

On 21 March 2009 my daughter’s bar/bat mitzvah classes received their chumashim at Shabbat services. There was a luncheon after services. My daughter turned to me then and said she had noticed the colors red, blue, and purple mentioned a lot in today’s parshah. We’d been reading Exodus 38-39. Yes, I said, those are the colors most commonly associated with Jewish liturgucal textiles because of the Mishkan. She asked, rather tentatively, whether they would be okay colors to have on a tallit. My heart leapt: my child had plucked a textile-related cultural value from the very heart of the Torah! Restraining myself from shrieking with joy, I said very matter-of-factly that yes, I thought I would be able to weave her a tallit with home-dyed stripes of blue, red, and purple on white.

After reading a number of articles on design in various back issues of Handwoven, I got an inspiration about the layout of the stripes. I designed them using the proportions of a piece of music. That is, I transcribed a piece of liturgical music: the way our congregation sings the Shema. Then I assigned each separate note a stripe. The width of the stripe was proportionally based on its duration relative to the shortest note in the piece, which was a sixteenth note. Accordingly, quarter notes were a 4, half notes an 8, and like that. Then I assigned a number of weft throws to the sixteenth note/pinstripe: four. I used my mad math skillz to determine that would give me a striped area totaling about 15.5” in length, which seemed like a goodly size for my purpose.

I laid out the resulting map of proportions on graph paper with a heavy pen, then photocopied it several times. This gave me sheets I could color to find the arrangement I liked. I began coloring them in a specific repeating sequence, starting with red at the ends of the tallis and progressing toward the purple nearer the center, which when worn would give the effect of the color sequence moving up from red toward purple. I found this color progression very significant: from adam to sky to the heavens, from infrared toward ultraviolet, the colors would appear to rise as the singing of the Shema rises. I thought all kinds of things as I worked with this progression. I liked my completed arrangement so much, I showed it to my daughter instead of trying any other combinations. I pointed out the two pinstripes that seemed to stand outside the pattern and suggested they be in metallic gold. My daughter loved that idea, and so I adopted it.

JaggerSpun’s 2/18 Zephyr yarn is what was used in all the tallit projects I could find written up as recipes (see sources for list). It is a 50% merino, 50% silk blend (5040 yards per pound, 30 wpi, 18-20 sett tabby, 22-28 sett twill). I bought two small balls of it at an FFF a few years ago so I could sample it when the time grew right. It met my daughter’s touch test and she approved it.

I bought the Zephyr for the project from Halcyon Yarn. I bought a mini-cone first, to begin dyeing the colored stripes. Prices were $69.95 for a 1-pound cone and $14.25 for a 600-yard mini-cone. The description at the Halcyon website read in part:

“A blend of Australian super fine merino wool and soft silk makes this yarn ideal for luxury products that can be worn next to sensitive skin. Besides it’s sensous [sic] texture, the wool/silk blend makes it warm for winter and cool in summer.... As a worsted spun yarn, you’ll fine they are smoother and shinier than woolen spun yarns. They also won’t full as much when washed/finished, so plan on a closer sett or tighter gauge (finish your swatch to determine if you like the finished piece).... Care: Dry cleaning recommended.”

The stripe pattern I eventually adopted requires some narrow stripes of metallic yarn. Somewhere down the line I will have to decide on and acquire some metallic yarn.

One of the goals of this project from the very beginning was for me to dye it myself with natural dyes. I set myself the additional goal of not using any modern mordants (tin or chrome). Ideally, of course, I would use the same colorants that in ancient times decorated the Mishkan: tekhelet, argaman, tola’at shani (blue from Murex trunculus, purple from Murex brandaris, and red from bug). Since that is of course not possible, I decided to use colorants that would mimic those shades as closely as possible.

• For tekhelet (Murex trunculus) I chose woad.

• For argaman, i.e., murex or Tyrian purple, I chose cochineal, knowing that I could push its pH factor to make it more red-violet like murex. If the shade came out too red, I could overdye it with woad to blue it up a bit.

• For tola’at shani I chose cochineal, which has a blend of red colorants very similar to the bug reds available in the Fertile Crescent in ancient times.

I also kept in mind an important aspect of the yarn I’d be working with; according to the Halcyon website’s description, “[t]he two fibers also absorb dyes slightly differently giving a shiny, intense color.” Since I already knew that dyeing silk and dyeing wool often required dissimilar processes, particularly in the mordanting phase, I knew I was facing a technical challenge.

At first I considered only a tabby structure, since every tallit I’d handled (that wasn’t jacquard woven) was tabby. But then I began to consider textured weaves. A slim rib in the warp might be nice. Then I considered whether I wanted something more like a patterned linen, say, a barleycorn or huck lace or Atwater-Bronson texture. Then I thought, well, if you’re going to do that, why not do it in one of the patterns you’ve long admired, like Whig Rose? I got all excited about it and researched some more.

After a while I realized, though, that any pattern of lace and floats was going to insulate somewhat due to the floats. If I were weaving wool, I wanted tabby in order to avoid the insulative factor of long floats. My daughter has enough problems with internal temperature regulation: I didn’t want to create something that she would be uncomfortable wearing.

I eventually decided on a tabby structure with weft-faced colored stripes in extended tabby. This would give the look of a medieval textile, Cloth of Ray, and could be easily woven on four shafts.

I skeined off the first mini-cone into three 200-yard skeins, 20 grams (0.7 oz) apiece. That will give me plenty of each of the three colors to use for the stripes.

Each skein needs to be treated differently. But I can combine mordanting for the red and purple stripes. That will call for 9 grams alum, 2.5 grams tartar, and a simmering period of two hours for the two hanks. I will then let the yarn cool overnight in the liquid, hang it to dry, and rinse well before dyeing.

Destined for the woad vat, I only needed to wash this one thoroughly and pre-soak it briefly before dyeing.

Destined for a cochineal bath. I planned to use Jim Liles’ “Mock Venetian Scarlet” recipe from The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing; I’ve used it before and gotten very nice bright-dark cool reds on wool. An alum-tartar mordant is required: 3.5 oz alum and 1 oz tartar to a pound of yarn, simmered for 2 hours.

Presented the most problems. I planned to use Liles’ “Cochineal Red-Purple (Crimson): Wool” recipe and push the pH toward purple. I’ve done this with silk, hopefully I can do it with a silk-wool blend. I will use the same alum-tartar mordant as the red skein.

Kaplan, Aryeh. Tzitzith: A Thread of Light. New York: National Conference of Synagogue Youth/Orthodox Union, 1984.

Liles, J.N. The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing: Traditional Recipes for Modern Use. Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

Kantor, Phyllis W. “The Work of the Weaver in Colors.” Handwoven, vol. X, no. 1 (January-February 1989), pp. 55-57. See also related “Prayer Shawl” project (pages 82-83 in the Instruction Supplement), which was designed by Yvonne Stahl.

Kimmelsteil, Laurie J. “Weaving Jewish Textiles.” Handwoven, vol. XIX, no. 5 (November/December 1998), pp. 41-43. See also related “Tallit for a Cantor” project (page 68 in the Instruction Section), which was designed by the author.

Halcyon Yarn – my source for the Zephyr yarn

Ptil Tekhelet – The Association for the Promotion and Distribution of Tekhelet

Tyrian Purple: history, chemistry, and sources – Christopher J. Cooksey’s web page, a great place to start for information on Tyrian purple