Shabbat Chazon

 It has been hot this week.

 

How hot was it??? It was sooo hot that the pigeons that normally hang out on the street lamps on 96th street were all huddling in the shade to avoid the sun.

Earlier in the week my husband and I visited an antique store. Had I endless room in my apartment I would have purchased this "Sew Mistress" toy sewing machine.

It looks like it would actually work, My cousin recently mentioned that our great aunt had purchased such a machine for her. It worked so well that her father,  my Uncle Sol, made a set of kitchen curtains using the crank operated machine. I could see the Sew Mistress tackling such a job without too much trouble. Just in case you were thinking of purchasing a new toy sewing machine for a child. Just don't. The toy sewing machines made today will just make a child feel like a failure because they are so poorly constructed.

The other thing I totally was lusting for at the antique store was 

the left-most bracelet on this display. It's just spectacular. I really lusted after it.Unfortunately the price was too hefty for me so  I took the photo so I can admire the bracelet and now you can too.

 

When all of our kids lived at home, I made a rule that all money left in pockets when I did laundry goes into the charity box in our kitchen. In the days when all of our kids lived at home the charity box was filled often with the bills and coins that the kids left in their jeans. I haven't added to the charity box in a while. This was my husband's recent contribution to the charity box.

Tisha B'Av begins on Saturday evening. Many Jews have the custom of not eating meat during the nine days befor the fast day. This is not a custom that my family follows.

I am not showing you the meat that I cooked but rather what I used to flavor it.

I still have to make gazpacho  to be the vegetable component of our meal. I think that we have eaten gazpacho nearly every day for the past week.

I made some more progress on Nini's tallit.

Last week I had made the blueberry bramble for the wild blueberries.

My machine had a leaf stitch that looked enough like blueberry leaves.

Unfortunatly, none of my machine stitches looked like

beach rose leaves.

It took me a few tries but eventually I figured it out.

I began by machine stitching the branches and the leaves but  hand embroidered the leaves using a mix of green threads in my needle. I used a stitch that is called fly stitch. I remember my sister using it during her embroidery days.

It isn't a particularly difficult stitch to do but for some reason it took me fifty years to figure it out.

Here is the embroidered bit of silk with the silk beach roses that I made resting on the leaves.

Today's music videos are two liturgical poems for Tisha B'Av. The first from the Ashkenazi canon and the second from the Sefardi. Both poems beautifully sung by women. ( My late friend Miriam always wanted me to find videos that were authentically religious but sung by women. I always think of Miriam when I find a good one--and here are two)

As always, hoping that the mourning and lamentations of  Tisha B' Av leads to better days.