Sterling Terrain V02 - Flipbook - Page 33
Sterling College | 31
Weaving Her Way:
Nelly Detra ‘16
When you are a weaver and you find something that you’d like to keep doing over and
over again, it is good to just stop right there and stick with it.
My name is Nelly Detra. I run a business called Black Cat Judaica where I hand weave
tallitot ()תותילט, which are Jewish prayer shawls, and I graduated from Sterling in 2016.
I grew up next door to a professional weaver as a kid. I spent a lot of time in her studio so I
did have weaving in my conscience from an early age. I went to Sterling for agriculture
originally and then I took a weaving class as an elective, kind of like a throwaway. I had this
idea that I already knew everything about fiber arts but in actuality it reignited this spark.
I said, “wait a minute, this is what I want to do.”
Sterling is a flexible place which is what worked really well for me because I am a very
self-starting learner and I really like to make my own plan. I like to follow whatever I
pick up and find the most interesting.
The tallit is actually something that you find in the Torah. It was commanded by God
that the Jews wear fringes on the four corners of their garments which is up for a lot
of interpretation so as a weaver I work within these parameters but beyond that I can
be creative. It is fantastic to be able to look at the culture coming up around this one
piece of fabric. The tallit is so important in all of Jewish history, spanning across cultures and literally millennia, and is the garment that holds us all together.
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Nelly’s story: