The Chuppah Begins

With four months and one day until the wedding, I've started our chuppah (read: "huppah") fabric. Technically, the Tallit, or prayer shawl goes on top of the Chuppha, but since we don't have one just, you know, lying around, I'm making one.

For those of you who don't know what a Chuppah, or huppah is, its a Jewish wedding tradition. It consists of four poles topped with the tallit or some other cloth of meaning. I'm not 100% on this, but I believe the chuppah poles are held by the groom's family. The symbolism is wonderful. If you want the whole skinny, read my first post about it here.

I've been searching for meaningful symbols to put on the Chuppah cloth for a while. I stumbled on this while looking up quilting stencils:

It's the most important Sh'ma, or prayer in Judaism. In doing some of these more nontraditional ideas in our wedding, Tay and I are hoping to take the glory of the ceremony away from us and put it back on G-d. I think using this sh'ma as our Chuppah topper is a great way to work toward that goal. Plus, it's beautiful, isn't it? I've created a design around it that will incorporate our parents and wedding party as well. There will be scroll work around the sh'ma where they can write down scriptures and words of encouragement- Tay's idea.

I have a few pictures of the first leaves being embroidered.

.....This is going to take a while.