sarah in nyc

I had purchaased black and red wool ribbed sweater knit from http://www.fabric.com/ . It looked perfect for a cardigan for my daughter. When she was home for Thanksgiving, I asked her if she would like me to make her a sweater out of the knit. She was delighted by the idea. So, I took the opportunity to both make my daughter a Chanukah gift, and do a tutorial. If anything is unclear, just ask about it in the comments. I will do my best to clarify.

My sister hates to iron with a passion that most people save for the political. I do lots of ironing. My cousin claimed that their cleaning lady loved to iron. Perhaps she did. I don't especially love to iron. I iron table cloths less for how lovely well pressed cloth looks on a table, but more for issues of space. Un-ironed cloths take up a whole lot less space. I have limited storage for linens, so I press. The 7 ironed cloths pictured from top to bottom are:  Hand loomed cotton circa 1974 -from my mother Printed Hawaiian themed cotton circa 1950- from my mother in law's stash- My friend Ann has the same cloth from her grandmother Ikea canvas upholstery cotton- purchased a couple of winters ago with my sister Navy blue waffle weave cotton - purchased at Paron and turned into a cloth about a month ago. This is my current go-to cloth Linen Vera apple printed cloth Circa 1968 - from my mother Indian twin sized bed spread- purchased a few years back so I could re-create the m...

Three years ago today, on the Jewish calendar, my mother in law died. It was just a couple of days after Thanksgiving, her birthday. She was 91. This photograph was taken on Mother's Day at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. This photo was taken before both the first and the second appearance of colon cancer, but after both breast cancers and the massive uterine tumor. Dementia was just beginning to make itself known, but was in an early, unclear phase. You could still think that my mother in law's quirky nature was causing the odd lapses. For all of my mother in law's medical ills, she lived her life with gusto until six weeks before her death. She wanted to live, despite the pain, despite the confusion and humiliation caused by the dementia. She wanted to live until the moment she decided to die. Even in the foggiest of the dementia, there were some things that remained certain in her mind. My mother in law knew that the recieved the highest grade in the city on the guida...

Sun and natural fibers are not friends. Usually that isn't a problem with clothing. But when you are dealing with curtains that hang in a sunny window, you basically have three choices. You can put up synthetics, or you can put up many layered draperies that take a long time to develop sun rot, or you can replace your curtains fairly often. My bedroom is one of the two rooms in my apartment that actually gets sunlight. I have gone the, replace often, route with the bedroom curtains. The last pair were blue chambray ones from Target. They lasted surprisingly well. As the house will be filled with company for Thanksgiving, some of the many flaws the the apartment are becoming unbearable. We have been doing some clutter purging and organizing. I also noticed that the bedroom curtains have fallen prey to sun-rot. It was time to replace them I stopped by Target yesterday, and hated all of the curtains they were selling. Friday, a box had arrived from http://www.fabric.com/ . I had...

  I am full of gratitude to my two dear friends in Israel, one who I met when I was three, the other who I met as a college freshman when I was seventeen. Both have taken on being nice to my older son. Both are doing this with open hearts.  I am touched beyond words. My friend Alan, alandivack .blogspot.com/ who loves to cook, asked me for my recipe for the savory bread pudding. So here it is. Savory Bread Pudding Most of a loaf of slightly stale challa Cube Challa and leave it out on your counter for about an hour so it gets even more stale Pre heat oven to 350 Put  9 x13 pan in the oven, add two Tbs of butter to pan to melt while oven preheats Process two onions in a food processor Add to pan in oven If you are making this for my husband and youngest son, leave out the onions Let onions brown in the pan. Sliced mushrooms would be nice here too, but again, leave them out if you are cooking for my youngest. In a bowl, beat three eggs. Add three cups milk and continue...

My oldest goes to college two hours from home. She woke up at 5:00 am  and came on a field trip to New York so she could come home for lunch. The meatballs for Shabbat were done just as she walked in the door. I made her a sandwich with the meatballs on what we call "Ho Bread" , a  home made boule` loaf made with whole grains I added some Thai Sweet Chili sauce to the sandwich. My oldest hummed as she ate. The sound of a satisfied eater. I am sending her home with another sandwich and a challa roll made with today's batch of challa. I suppose, if I were really a nice mother I would send her back with a whole loaf.  I really don't want to be baking the day after Thanksgiving, so she will have to be satisfied with a roll. It's really nice when  a college student is willing to wake up at 5:00 am for my cooking.

Lettering, painted on silk and tacked downwith chain stitching. Embroidery complete, andsilk gazar trimmed away. In the picture, it looks like a quick process. It took many pesky hours. It was delightful, in comparison, to cut away the yellow silk.

I'm not tramping in the woods. I'm not raking up leaves from my yard. Here it is, my experience of fall foliage.

I grew up reading tons of how to books. I loved working my way through the entire extensive hand work collection at the Thomas Crane Public library. Often, that knowledge comes in handy. I get stuck and then the illustrations and directions from a book I may have read when I was twelve come to me. I know, other people have heads filled with Torah. My head is filled with how to directions from various sources. The reason I needed to distract myself yesterday, was that I needed to apply lettering to the parochet/ark curtain. Applying lettering to a piece has been a point of difficulty for artisans, even back in ancient times. There is a mosaic floor in Israel from Roman times. The lettering is in mirror writing. It isn't in mirror writing as a cipher or hidden message, but rather because the artisan, clearly asked his friend with a nice handwriting to do the lettering. The friend wrote out the letters with a piece of charcoal. The artisan then patted the charcoaled lettering onto t...

Wet chicken with root vegetables, cranberries and one dried pepper As I was cooking Shabbat dinner this week, I realized that I tend to think of cooking in big broad categories. Generally, I cook chicken dry, that is, baked or roasted uncovered in the oven. I can throw in any of a variety of ingredients, so it may taste different but the basic cooking technique is the same week after week. My sister tends to cook chicken wet, that is cooked covered in a pot on top of the stove. This week, I was in the mood for wet chicken. I suppose most people would call it a stew. My wet chicken was made up of onions, celery, some beautiful parsnips, potatoes and some of the gravy from last week's chicken and about a cup of cranberries. My husband was away in California for most of the week, visiting his father and sister. He brought me some dried peppers as a gift. I added a pepper to the pot as well. I was unsure how hot the pepper was, so I just added one. I thought that the fruity hot fl...

Last year  I was shopping in the fabric district with some of my sewing buddies. Between the three of us, we bought a lot of fabric.At the cash register there was a bin of remnants.  For sewers, this is akin to putting candy bars near the checkout line. Impulse purchase!!!!When nifty fabrics are so inexpensive,it's easy to have a "why not" attitude about buying. Mis-dyed purple stretch lace? Why not?  Orange oil cloth? Why not? Quilted midnight blue patent leather? Why not? A few yard of soiled white novelty knit?? Why not? One of my "why not"s was a black cotton blend pointelle sweater knit with a lurex thread. It had some damage to it but it looked like there was enough to make a sweater. The shop owner might have just thrown it in as a freebie because of the damage. I can't for the moment remember exactly how little I paid for the piece, but it cost less than getting to and from the garment district. I kept pulling it out every couple of weeks and tri...

Last night I was at a Shiva House. Two different people asked me about the possibility of making atallit with me and they wanted to know what it is like. So partially in answer to them, here is the answer. First of all, I can't tell you what your tallit will look like before we meet.  Each tallit is made specifically for the client. First we study the text around putting on a tallit. Wew look at the third paragraph of the Sh'ma which is the biblical source for out wearing a tallit. We also look at the verses and intentional prayers recited when we put on a tallit. Looking at the biblical and rabbinic texts together my client gets a better sense of what a tallit is legally but also some of the larger spiritual job that a tallit needs to fulfill. Then, I pull out lengths of silks and wools for my client to try on. A tallit needs to feel right on the body. A tallit that is too itchy or too slippery distracts the wearer from prayer.This part of the process is always fun. The ...

Noah's invitation, closed. the text comes from God's promise to never again destroy the earth after the flood. The text is written in the form of a stylized olive leaf.  When I work in fabric I control the entire process. Doing graphics, I work in collaboration with the printer. I was lucky that Diane, Noah's mom chose to work with such an excellent printer. Marissa, from Quad Rite has a great eye and worked to make my part of the invitation just look better. Marissa suggested the  muted olive green ink. Diane who loves muted colors found a sage green envelope. Other times when I have done invitations, my work has been begun by hand, but then I manipulate the art work on the computer. This time, I worked the old fashioned way, completely by hand. Each draft was begun anew with pencil and rolling ruler. It was actually pleasant working this way. Marissa shrunk my work down by about 20% . Both Diane and I were grateful to Marissa's experience which made both of o...

Two of my friends were involved with the Longitudinal Jewish Continuity Study commissioned by UJA Federation. The point of that study was to see if, and how young Jews live Jewish lives in America. The study looked at synagogue membership, rates of intermarriage and levels of ritual observance. The Birthright  trips to Israel for Jewish  young adults are an outgrowth of the study. Over the past couple of days, I have had a series of email exchanges with a friend from one of the sewing discussion groups that I am involved with, that made me re-think some of the issues around inter-marriage. My friend, Marky, emailed me a few weeks ago. Marky isn't Jewish, but her daughter married someone who is Jewish and committed to raising the kids Jewish. Marky was looking for a Chanukah themed embroidery program. She was planning to make Chanukah gift bags for her grandchildren. Marky wanted to decorate the bags with appropriate symbols and perhaps the children's Hebrew names....

is sometimes the one you need to make the most. Every closet needs it's share of memorable clothes. But what one really needs, is truly boring garments that you can wear over and over again in various combinations.  Boring dress worn with fun new belt  This purple tank dress qualifies as a perfect boring dress. It's a simple tank dress made out of a pique` knit, much like you might find in a Lands' End polo. It isn't a fabric one gets ecstatic about when one finds it in a fabric store. It's a boring, comfortable, serviceable, fabric. The color is dark and quiet as well. This dress, however will be worn constantly. If I wore this dress to synagogue every week for a year ( as I did with a previous ideal boring dress), no one would notice. But I may very well get compliments on what I was wearing, week after week.  Every closet needs lots of  boring clothes.   Boring dress worn with boring grey wool cardigan and a big belt  I used a favorite summer ...

This week I was going through a copy of The New York Times Menu Cookbook by Craig Claiborne from 1966. I was deciding if I ought to keep it, or put it out on the give-away table in my lobby. Aside from the fussy- inefficiency of the recipes. Claiborne inevitably chooses a method that is time consuming and and difficult over easy and efficient methods. The other thing that struck me was the recipe names. I realize that isn't how I cook at all. Today I was cooking chicken for Shabbat. I checked out what I had in the fridge. I noticed that I had a pomegranate that was looking a bit exhausted. There were some apples in the fruit drawer that were less than delicious and an orange. I decided to throw all of them on the chicken. I opened the pomegranate into a bowl, peeled pithed and cut up the orange, cut up the apples and added them to the bowl. Then I added mustard, olive oil, Jamaican curry and a bit of honey and tossed that over the chicken. I suppose I could make up a ...

Last night, I went with my friend Claudia to see Love, Loss and What I Wore, the Off-Broadway adaptation of the Ilene Beckerman memoir. The book is a small format book  anchored by illustrations of clothing from pivotal moments in Beckerman's life. Each garment illustration is accompanied by an essay that like the drawings, is evocative of much more than it's simple form might suggest. The play, written by the Ephron sisters is essentially a reading. With similarly evocative stories from other women expanding the Beckerman stories, much the same way that as you read her book, your own stories related to clothing begin to fill your head. Before the play begins, charmingly, the music on the PA system is all clothing related. Just a fun touch, you get the sense of joy the music director had in selecting the music. When the actresses walked from the wings to their seats onstage I realized that I have spent too much time hanging out with my fitting fanatic friends on online se...

Occasionally, my husband and I read Torah at our synagogue. To read Torah you essentially have to memorize a passage of text and the musical notations connected with the text. The Torah scroll does not contain vowels, any indications of breaks between verses or the notations for the cantillations. I noticed a few months back that my husband and I study for our readings in entirely different ways. He works in a methodical way, learning each verse flawlessly before he goes on to learn the next verse. I have trouble learning that way. I do better going over and over the whole assigned chunk of text. As I go over the text some un-related chunks begin to come together. Eventually the learned chunks out number the unlearned chunks and finally the whole text is complete.  I'm working on the Schechter parochet/ark curtain in a similar way. The earth is mostly done, but not completely done. I have added some, but not all of the shimmer to the water, the lettering on the arch is done but...