A project from the past

It is spring and my younger daughter is in 1st grade. In practical terms, this means I need to get going on embellishing a book cover for her use at school. This is no ordinary book, it is a prayer book, and the world for prayer in Hebrew is "tefilah". So henceforward when I say things like, "the tefilah project", you'll know what I mean.

This is not my first go-round with a book cover project. I have an older daughter who needed a cover three years ago. In that case I went with applique. My eldest is named for my grandfather, and I was able to procure a monogrammed handkerchief of his to use in the project. I also used fabric from her younger sister's baby sling and bright scraps from a quilt that I made for a dear friend's young daughter who was suffering from brain cancer and was spending endless hours in a dreary hospital. Finally I used bits of fabric I hand dyed years ago as well as some green scraps left over from the challah cover that we currently use every Friday night (as long as it's not a yom tov). I assembled all of this into a stylized Jerusalem scene, topping it off with some hot fix rhinestones in the configuration of some of the major navigational constellations in the night sky. Those stars have long since rubbed off, but otherwise the cover looks largely unchanged three years later.