Up late but done

 So, this is the last bit of sewing that I have to sew for the Easter production; dress rehearsal is tomorrow so I had to finish tonight.

I told myself I had to be done by midnight; I have a whole hour to spare, lol.

Another lady is making black costumes for the two Pharisees in our cast, but we needed something resembling the prayer shawls that peek out from under the head drapes.  As I mentioned in the last post, we had some from when we had blue and white Pharisee costumes and at first we thought we'd just sew black ribbon over the blue ribbon.

But, you know, ya never really know what might be useful in the future and we might need those blue-ribboned drapes, since we still have the blue-and-white costumes they go with, so I just decided to make new ones with the black ribbon..

Now, I want to say right up front that these are in no way intended to replicate an actual tallit.  This is stage costuming and is meant to suggest it only.  Despite my usual over-the-top dedication to being authentic, this is something I think is better served by suggestion.  Using an actual tallit with an otherwise inaccurate costume just seems ....wrong.  So we have reasonable facsimiles, not actual replicas.

That includes the tassels.  In the older ones, I just used purchased tassels but sewing notion availability being what it is nowadays, the only tassels I could find in the right size (and price, lol) were red and black, which wouldn't do.  So I bought several skeins of ecru embroidery floss and set about making my own.

And I made tassels, not proper tzitzit, because...well, the whole cultural appropriation thing, and I had no idea how to actually make tzitzit and I didn't really have time to research it.  I had made tassels before, as part of a project with my jr high girls class back in the day,  so I at least had an idea of where to start.

And I took a shortcut.  The instructions I'd had on making tassels began with wrapping the floss around a card...and, you know, those skeins are really already looped around.

So I just cut 'em in half.  Carefully.

Then I cut a length from the extra skein I'd bought  and tied off the looped end of the half-skein, after draping a bit of blue floss over it (the blue thread is specified in Numbers, so I used it, even though it's not proper tzitzit)

I tied it tightly , then cut another bit of floss and tied it off just below the bend.

I wrapped the ends of that second piece around and tied it, then wrapped them around to the other side and tied again...several times... and finished it by pulling the ends down through the middle.  This looks rather muddled, but you can see the large darning needle I used to pull those ends through.

Then I trimmed off the ends even

Sewed them onto the corners of the drapes.

And here's the finished product. 

 I don't think it will show much; I think there's a black head drape that will be over it. But I haven't seen the new costumes, just the inspiration picture, so I'm just going off of that.

Now I need to go collect my old costume and head drapes and such to take to church tomorrow.  It's a short production...only about 25 ish minutes...so we will have regular choir first and I'll have to change from church clothes to the bible costume pretty quickly.  Without smearing the makeup, lol.  Gonna try the mesh-bag-over-the-head trick; hopefully that will work.

I have more bible costumes to sew this spring, but they are for the kids ministry at the church where my two younger kids are on staff so they can wait until after things settle down a bit.