מתחיל בגנות ומסיים בשבח

We are told that we should retell the Passover story beginning with the terrible stuff and ending with the glory. I am following the same precept here in this post.

Earlier this week I was recovering an armchair and needed to get my staple gun from the little closet in our maid's room. Before you think that I am a fancy lady with a live in maid, you should know that nearly every Manhattan apartment built for middle class folks in the pre WW1 era was constructed with a little room off the kitchen for the maid. In the days before most people owned electric appliances like washing machines and vacuum cleaners one needed a maid to keep your head above water.

Some people use the maid's room as a home office or as a room for a child. Ours functions as a basement. The plastic bins that hold Costco dry goods are there, some of our Passover pots live there, our kids college textbooks, the washer and dryer and a closet filled with hardware supplies and tools.

As I reached for the staple gun in the closet in the maid's room I accidently knocked over a can of red enamel paint. The paint spilled all over the floor in the maid's room. I tracked some into our kitchen. It was a giant mess. Forty five minutes later I had cleaned it all up.

So, now onto better things, in no particular order.

My youngest had purchased a rayon Hawaiian shirt at a thrift. the print was great.

However the pocket had torn away from the body of the shirt and the shirt itself had holes where it had been joined to the pocket. By now, I have done enough mending that I know that if you patch with a fabric that is too strong the weakened fibers are MORE likely to tear again. I needed to find fabric that was the same weight as the rayon Hawaiian shirt.

I found a scrap of rayon that was exactly the right weight.

Unfortunately, the colors didn't really go.

I cut bias strips of the rayon bandana print and covered the damaged bits of shirt.

I was pleased that by cherry picking the bits of the print that I used the mend didn't actually look too terrible. My son asked me to cover the bottom seam of the pocket as well.

It isn't terrible. My son can wear his new from the thrift shirt without the pocket flapping and without causing any more damage to the shirt. I did some invisible mending on the reverse of the shirt---and you can't see it because it actually is invisible from the right side.

I made more trees for the Nova Scotia tallit for Nini.

I am just over half way done with this stip of trees.

Every time I walk past the trees I tell my husband how much I love them. I really do think that they are terrific.

When we were in Santa Barbara I made a thrift shop score.

I bought a bag of these beautiful hand-dyed silk embroidery threads for $5. Normally, each little hank retails for $7. There were three or four bags of silk thread but I chose the one with the colors that would work best for Nini's tallit.

I have been embroidering more fog

with the variegated blue silk threads from my new stash of silk threads..

Tonight is a birthday dinner for someone that I have been friends with since seventh grade. I made fig ice cream for the celebration.

I know that it looks ugly but the flavor is rich and deep.

Yesterday in the thrift store I saw an old friend. Actually more correctly, the cousin or sibling of an old friend.

Mt parents owned these lovely Spode dishes in a rich cobalt blue rather than the grey shown here.

They used their lovely Spode dishes for elegant dairy meals. My older sister now serves her guests on my parents' dishes. it made me happy to see these in the thrift. No, I didn't need to purchase the dishes. seeing them and sharing them with you is enough.

There are a couple of excellent shadows

Shabbat Shalom!

Two secular Israeli songs about Shabbat that describe what one does on Friday night for your listening pleasure.

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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