blogging while ill

I haven't been posting because I have been sick.

Here I am staying warm.

I am still not sure if this is food poisoning or some sort of s stomach bug. The only remotely good thing about this is that I have lost some weight. It would have been nicer to achieve the same result by going to a luxurious spa. Last night I stupidly chose to eat an exciting supper---some chicken soup with big chunks of vegetables. It's back to plain rice and white potatoes for me...what could I have been thinking?

Anyway, I couldn't have Miles and his family come by on Sunday as planned to tie the tzitzit so i tied them on my own.

I also made Miles a tallit bag.

I used this heavy upholstery weight striped denim in my stash. It wears like iron. I had made myself a skirt out of some of it a few years ago and know that this will wear like iron. Ihe decorative panel is made out more the woven ribbon panel that I had made for the pinot/corner pieces. I edged it in more of the gold and blue striped ribbon and added a few rows of machine embroidery for good measure. The zipper is edged with more of the striped metallic ribbon.

I lined the bag in African printed cotton.

I am going to indulge myself here and add a few other shots of the tallit.

I love the free motion embroidery on the atara.

Hand couching the gold cording for the lettering was actually easier than I had anticipated. I finally realized that you don't need to cut the cording between the letters and can just float the cord on the underside between the letters. doing that cuts down of bumpy knots and joins. had i seen this in a book fifty years ago? or had it just taken me fifty years to figure this out?

Later today Miles' father will be picking up the tallit and it will no longer delight me each time I pass it in my dining room.

A friend had hand surgery and can't wear a standard coat. I suggested that she needed a warm cape to wear. After a short discussion about turning an old blanket into winter wear for someone with limited had usage...I remembered that I HAD a fabulous wool cape in my closet. It had belonged to my friend Alix's elegant mother.

The cape looks rather like

and is almost too long for me to wear. My friend is seven inches shorter than I am.

I used a twelve inch ruler as my hemming gauge and safety pinned the new hem into place. this needed to be functional rather than perfect so I aimed for good enough rather than perfect sewing.

I hope that this keeps my friend warm.

The following is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time.

sewing machine dance

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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!!!

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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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