What I Wore, Without A Snazzy Name

Another braid- this time with a small triangular scarf underneath, then just the one scarf in the braid, and my hair already braided, which shortened it, but gives a little bit of interesting texture (also, I hadn't decided what I was doing with my hair until I'd already braided it up).

Halakhic Prequels

In my anachronistic exploration of halakhic texts pertaining to head-covering (currently, women's head-covering), I went to look at the Tur, and found that in bringing you the Shulhan Arukh, I have already brought you the Tur on this topic- the wording is identical.

(Here it is, as a reminder:  לא תלכנה בנות ישראל פרועות ראש בשוק, אחת פנויה ואחת אשת איש

The daughters of Israel should not walk with uncovered heads in the marketplace, both unmarried and married women)

While I was looking through the Tur to find it, I found that earlier in the same siman, there's another relevant snippet of halakha- "אסור לשמוע  קול ערוה או לראות שערה"  It is forbidden to listen to the voice of a sexually-forbidden-woman, or to look at her hair.   The same thing is brought in the Shulhan Arukh, again word-for-word (E"H 21:1).  

This is presented in the context of a variety of prohibitions on male attention to women, much of which I am, at the least, quite uncomfortable with- as you can probably tell by the beginning of the sentence.  Nevertheless, it presents an interesting balance to the following se'if, which somehow changes the feeling of the thing, for me.  I shouldn't show it, and they shouldn't look.   If I fall through, they're still not allowed to enjoy my error.  

Somehow, I manage not to react to this text by putting my head-covering into that category of "do this to protect your too-easily-tempted men from sin", a philosophical approach to modesty that often irks me.  I don't know why it doesn't press those buttons, since it would be logical enough.  The chain of reasoning would be: 1. they oughtn't look.  Therefore 2. I should have to keep it out of sight.  I dislike the one-sided responsibility for someone else's obligation that goes on in this approach.  Expressing the requirement for women to cover their heads as a separate requirement helps prevent this from being my dominant reading of the rule.  The other meanings that head-covering has both for me and in the text, also keeps it from falling into this hole for me.  

Heads and History: A Silhouettes Sequel

Clearly, I like alliteration a little too much.  But anyway, back to business...

Here's some of my grandmother's input on the use of those padded-front scarves I was talking about:

Hi, Maya; Just read your current blog, and, for some reason, the head covering i see, in my mind, was in the gold/brown tone, with the padding in the front. We wore it to protect our hair do from the wind, or, perhaps, as a babooska in the rain...the one I'm visualizing might not be the one in your dress up chest...I think I had it when I wore a yellow raincoat and bought the scarf to go around my neck...can't really remember, but I do remember wearing scarves on my head, a little hair showing in the front, and the scarb going behind the ears and tieing in the back, on my neck, in a little knot. Wish I had a picture to demonstrate,but we didn't take many photos at that time, and I prob. would have taken off the scarf to show my hair, which was full and curley at that time.

I'm trying to think about why I thought about those sorts of scarves as what was "in" in the Jewish community- I think my mother-in-law mentioned it, from early in her marriage.

In any case, I did end up finding one of those scarves in my parents' attic, and borrowed it to photograph here.  So- here we go.

 It doesn't look so different, although the first time I put it on behind my ears, it had this sort of odd poke-back and ruffle look.  Somehow it didn't happen when I put it on for the camera.  The size and texture of the fabric, along with the color that this one happens to be, gave the back a rather sweet ruffled look when it wasn't tucked in- very innocent, which I found interesting.

The padding made the top rather hot, though.  I wonder if these were more favored for cooler weather.

Silhouette and Style

I'm visiting my parents, right now- my husband and I came out yesterday, on something of a whim.  At some point, last night, I was talking to my grandmother about this blog, and we were talking about her appreciation for what I do.  Somehow, this all got around to bringing me to consider what sorts of silhouettes I seem to want to create.  Don't ask about the chain of thought- I'm confident that it neither makes a lot of sense, nor matters.

In any case, perhaps as a result of my shorter-than-average height, or my mother's dicta as I was younger in praise of hairstyles that "gave me some height", I have lately wanted to wrap my scarves so that they do exactly that- add some height.  This is particularly true for when I want to dress nicely.  Wrapping additional scarves in ways that layer and create a fairly thick "crown" around my head is a style you've been seeing from me quite a lot, here.  The last wedding I went to, I pinned a necklace to my scarf, also drawing light and attention upwards.

I've seen a variety of products online, designed to add height to one's head-silhouette.  Most seem to be padding of one sort or another, added under your scarf.  They seem to be popular already in the Muslim community, and I've seen a number of Jewish women getting into them as well.  This seems to be the stylish silhouette, right now.  So maybe I'm just following the trends.

It reminds me (and this was part of the way I got to this topic, from talking to my grandmother) of a couple of scarves/head-coverings that were part of the dress-up chest when I was little.  They had been my great-grandmother's I think, and I could never figure out quite what they were for, when I was little, because they had a padded section in front.  (At the time, I also didn't like the fabrics much, so there wasn't a lot of incentive to find ways to play with them.)  I don't know if that was the style, then (my bubbe didn't usually cover her hair/head, but I suppose some situations called for it?), or if the padding was to help keep the scarf on.  Nevertheless, those scarves would make a different silhouette from anything I see done now- either the styles that add some height or the more low-lying ones.  Too bad they aren't still lying around somewhere, so that I could make a comparison.

Tichels and Tefillin

One of the more practically complex aspects to being both egalitarian and invested in head-covering is combining covering my head and putting on tefillin in a halakhically valid manner.  If you're not willing to show some amount of hair, this just can't happen in public, because the head tefillin -both the bayit and the strap- need to rest on your head, not on another object (a mistake I see on Purim just about every year, from people with wigs/hats as parts of their costume, who just aren't thinking about it.)

I manage it by pushing my scarf back just a little bit, so that the tefillin rest in the appropriate place, with the bottom edge just at my hairline.  Then I run my fingers around my scarf, pushing it back just enough so that the retzuah- the strap of the tefillin- is on my hair and not on my scarf.  Since I use kippah clips to keep my scarves on, I lift them enough to let the retzuah slide underneath them.  The whole thing adds about 5-10 seconds to how long it takes to put on tefillin, and doesn't muss most scarf arrangements too badly.

Some styles are better for davening in the morning than others- things like a bun style, braid, or pretty much anything that doesn't have much bulk on top will work with tefillin.  When I want to do my tichel in a crown or other top-heavy fashion, I often just either wear a large, crocheted cap/kippah (if I'm davening at home, which has been my default this year- hopefully I'll make improvements to my minyan attendance soon), or tie my tichel just at the basic level for coverage and leave the tails hanging until after I finish davening.

On the other hand, I don't know how to work this sort of thing with a hat with any sort of brim, unless you can take it off to put the tefillin on and put it back on over them.  So berets are doable with this system, but anything else gets tricky, unless you don't mind people getting a view of your hair, if you're in public.

Recap in step form:
1. Put on headcovering.  Expect anything with a lot of bulk around your head to get jostled off or get in the way.
2. Put on tefillin in the appropriate fashion.  When you get to the head, start putting it on, and say the bracha. Then:
3. adjust scarf out of the way of the tefillin in front.
4.  Run your fingers around the strap, adjusting scarf out of the way.  Settle everything in place.
5. Go on with putting your tefillin on, daven, etc.

After Davening:
1. When you come to remove your tefillah shel rosh (head tefillin), do so carefully, taking the strap out from under any clips or other obstructions first, for minimum frustration.
2. Touch up your tichel in any way you feel needed. For example: tug the front forward a little if you want, re-clip to tighten if needed, or put up the ends of your scarf, or additional scarves, to give yourself some height.

What I Wore and A Small Crochet Pattern

I promise more thoughtful content soon, but in the meantime- what I wore yesterday.  (The picture is from evening, so it has slipped back a little- it started out just behind my hairline.)

One scarf with the ends wrapped in a crown style, one behind the other, with a small headband in front of them, and 3 crocheted flowers (sewn onto over-sized bobby-pins) attached to the front "crown".  Not 4th of July colors, but a little bit festive while still aiming for a minimum of heat-retention.  (We did some walking around yesterday, and I didn't want to overheat too badly.)

The flowers are 3 layers of crochet in different colors (great for using scraps of kippah thread).  Let's see if I can remember the pattern- they make a nice little accessory, and I think they work even better on a scarf like this than they did in my hair.
Round 1: Make a loop and chain 5.  (dc, chain 2) 7 times, join to third chain stitch.
Round 2: slip stitch into first space.  (sc, 3 dc, sc) in each space.  join. Fasten off first color.
Round 3.  Fasten new color with a sc around one of the dc from round 1.  chain 5.  (dc around next dc from round 1, chain 3), around and join- 8 sections.
Round 4: slip stitch into first space. (sc, 4dc, sc) in each space.  join and fasten off.
Round 5:  Fasten new color with a sc around one of the dc from round 1.  chain 6.  (dc around next dc from round 1, chain 4), around and join- 8 sections.  
Round 6: slip stitch into first space. (sc, 5dc, sc) in each space.  join and fasten off.  
Alternately, you can substitute (sc, 2 dc, tc, 2 dc, sc) for round 6, to give slightly pointier leaves.  


Then simply sew or glue to a bobby-pin, safety pin, or clip, and you're all set.  

Maya and Hats

I'm much more comfortable with scarves than with hats.  Hats tend to fall across my forehead and give me a headache, for one.  For another thing, finding a hat that can accommodate my hair in a functional way is not so easy to do.  I can wear a braid with some of them, but it isn't always the way they're designed to be worn, and therefore some of them look pretty silly.  Others just don't provide enough head coverage.  So I have a handful of hats, but I don't wear them so very often.  It sometimes feels like a fashion failure- such pretty things, and I don't know what to do with them.

Recently, I found a nice solution that makes at least some of my hats a bit more wearable.  I remembered that my sister-in-law often wears a light-weight tichel under her hat, when she wears one (mostly to weddings and the like).  I've done that in the past, so that I could take the hat off when I wanted to- often a big success.

But in this case, I wanted to wear my sunhat, which is just  a little big on me- so there was room to wear a scarf wrapped with both ends up around the top of my head, one over the other, underneath it.

This let me wear my hat with the bottom of the brim propped up to my hairline, rather than cutting across my forehead, irritating it and cutting off my range of vision.  It also meant that I had a nice-looking tichel wrapped, if I wanted to take the hat off.  All together, it was a very nice combination.

It isn't a real solution to "how to make hats convenient for me", but it's a good step in the right direction- and very good for my skin, in this heat and sun.

Another Day, Another Covering

Just another quick peek at what I've done with my head today...  I seem to be pretty stuck on a "wrap some other colors around my head" kick- so, with the same skirt I wore for Shabbat and a purple t-shirt, here it is:

 So- what seems to be the usual 3 scarves, one tied bun-style, the other two folded up (One, the olive-green pattern, is a smallish square, folded in a triangle, than wrapped up into a tube, basically.  The other, blue and black, is a rectangle, loosely folded.), and wrapped around.  The difference this time is that I wrapped the rectangle around once, then layered the tube/square just behind that, then did up a second loop of the rectangle.  I think it avoids a little of the awkward backward projection that I got on Shabbat.

And here, from the back, you can see that the bulk of the thing is the dark red scarf, even if you can barely see it in the first photo.

Another Shabbos: Layering and A Bangle

I don't know what else to call what I used: it's really some sort of cheap glass pendant that I got at a street fair.  But it's pretty big, and it looked like I could put a thin scarf through it- so I gave it a shot, and it worked.

I wanted to pick up the colors from my outfit- often my main factor in scarf-selection.

I put together a green top with a multicolored skirt, with green and two different reds as its main (non-black) colors.

So I took a little risk and took out three scarves in just those colors, and ended up putting the two reds right next to each other.

(Pardon the non-ideal picture: it was fairly close to candle-lighting, and I didn't want to keep fussing.)



I really like the way it turned out from most angles:

Please pardon my shirt tag in the next couple of photos...  


I do like the mix of colors from the back, though. It feels dramatic and exciting, to me.  

 However, straight on sideways (is that a possible direction?  What I mean is- how it looks from the side, as in the picture below), I'm not entirely sure.  I think it might be improved by folding the second/dark red scarf one more time, so it doesn't project as far back.  

Heat

It's summer- no surprises there.  And generally, I deal with heat fairly well, as long as I stay hydrated.  But somehow, last night felt hotter than usual for me, and I'm still feeling sort of over-heated this morning.  I'll be home most of the day- we're having friends over for a word game party this afternoon, and we don't have air conditioning.  (Ok, we now own an air conditioner, but it doesn't fit in our windows...)  

So I tried out a trick I read about- wetting down your tichel before putting it on.  Now, I only got dressed a little while ago, but so far, it feels lovely, and I don't think it looks any different.