sarah in nyc

a necklace made out of safety pins Yesterday, my older son and I went to the Museum of Art and Design. I went to see the exhibit "Second Lives" with my mother Thanksgiving weekend and I have been bugging my boys to come see the exhibit with me. The exhibit features work, both functional and decorative that was made out of material originally made for a different purpose. So there is a chair made out of high heeled shoes, a chaise made out of welded quarters, a Egyptian style necklace made out of carpenter's folding rulers, a giant flower made out of plastic forks. When I went Thanksgiving I was struck by the pure enjoyment of the museum goers. How often do you go to a museum and hear the visitors laughing with pleasure at seeing such cleverness? This large scale piece is made up entirely of collaged clothing labels One piece I particularly loved was a Shaker style highboy made out of junk yard metals. The door panels were made up with Gees Bend Quilts inspired stripes...

Here are some more details of the Torah mantle. It is hard to photograph. My camera can either do dark,or it can do sparkles, but it can't do both at the same time.

For the last few days I have been alternating my time between finishing my son's bar-mitzvah invitation which mostly involved lots of fussing with the computer and working on the Torah mantle. Usually I avoid hand work, but this piece is mostly made by hand. I added lots of beads over the past couple of days. The sanctuary in my synagogue is huge and the piece needs to sparkle or it will just get lost. Thus the vast quantity of beads. I decided to construct the mantle and then fit it onto the padded wooden form. I am attaching the mantle to the form with rows of beads that look kind of like fringe. I hadn't planned on the fringe, but it looks cute. The photo is fuzzy I will take more pictures in day light so all of you can obsess with how great it is along with me. My older son was nice enough to hold the mantle up for me so I could take a photo. He got tired, otherwise I would have taken more pictures. But yes, I am grateful that he was willing to do this boring task for me....

Today, I went to see this exhibit with my friend Connie. I had first seen photos of Calder jewelery back in the 1970's. Most of this jewelery was made for friends and for family members. All I can say is, I wish that Alexander Calder were my friend. I love how clear it is how much fun he was having making this jewelery. I also adore how when you look at his work you can see both the thought process that goes into each piece as well as evidence of his hands working the piece. It is one of those post industrial revolution things. Pre -industrial revolution, hand work needed to look perfect. Post industrial revolution the evidence of handwork becomes the real luxury. So is this a cheap way of saying " It is OK if my work is full of errors." Actually, not exactly,but when a piece has little odd variations in it, it keeps the eye and the brain engaged. Calder's work is full of work that shows evidence of his hands. The copies available for sale were the same shapes as t...

This blog has just passed it's 1000 hit milestone. I'm so excited..and thanks everyone for stopping by!!!! Sarah

I tend to be great at coming up with fabulous products , but they have only a severely limited audience. ( Clip on skis for baby strollers, for those few snowy days when the city hasn't plowed yet.) This tutorial is a really good one for the vast audience out there of Torah mantle makers. I guess it's good too if you have a great need to cover a wooden form with a hole or two or more in it. Most Torah mantles are made like wrap around skirt permanently attached to a hard flat frame with two holes in it to allow the wooden rollers ( or atzei chayyim ) to stick out of the top. Usually this wooden top is made out of wood, these days out of plywood. I have, however, seen several older Torah mantles where this hard top is made out of several layers of newspapers. Clearly, this is not the best choice if you want the mantle to look good for a long time. I have been working away on the mantle in memory of my father and with my son's bar mitzvah 61 days away--I need to get going on...

Thanks to those of you who decided to guess which of the stencilled leaves my youngest preferred for his tallit stripe. He hated the fat leaves. He thought they were ugly, pure and simple. He did love the more willowy looking willow leaves. I love how easy it is to get a fairly naturalistic looking leaf. I really don't draw all that well. But with the stencil, I can fake something that can pass for willow leaves. Yes the stencil was cut from an index card. Two long and pointy curved shapes. I occasionally flip the stencil. It helps to create the illusion of naturalism.

making it difficult for some people to post comments and most importantly, their quiz replies . If Blogger is behaving badly for you, just email me, sj.hand@verizon.net and I will post your reply for you.

When you are done. Let your stencilled fabric sit for a few days. then iron with paper between the iron and the pigmented silk. It will smell a bit fishy until you are done ironing, because of the oils in the pigment stick. The smell will dissipate in a couple of days.

It's time for me to get started on the tallit I'm making for my youngest son. And although the expression in Yiddish is that " Shoemaker's children go barefoot ", my two older kids each have a lovely tallit that I made, each with it's own brand of obsessive hand work. My kid's Torah reading is the beginning of Leviticus. It's really kind of grim. I know that some folks disagree with me, but you have to agree that it is lacking in narrative. The Haftara though is great. It's from Isiah and hard to go wrong. I asked my kid to look at his H aftarah and see if any phrases struck him as especially lovely, something he would want on his tallit . His first choice was great text, but I thought not so wonderful for a tallit " It is I, who erases your sins ". The phrase which is so familiar from the High Holiday liturgy seemed a little grim to see each time you put on your tallit. So then he came back with " k'aravim al yivlei m...

I can't tell you how often people ask me why I don't hire people to sew for me. I guess it might seem to be sensible for me to design clothes or Challa covers, or tallitot and then just have other people sew them up. I don't know how other folks work their way through the design process. The way I work, first my client and I talk about what the needs are for the particular piece. Then I draw a fairly rough sketch in pencil. This sketch serves as my map in putting the piece together. While that sketch serves as my map, or in the language of the Renaissance artists, my cartoon, many of my artistic decisions and refinements take place as I'm actually working. Physically manipulating the fabrics helps give me ideas about different ways to proceed. If I hired a seamstress or a sempter to do my work, I suspect that while the work might be sewn with more skill, it would ultimately be less interesting to look at. Today, I am working on the pink and brown tallit . I need to s...

a Walmart dress??? I had purchased this dress the summer before last. It is made by George. The dress was what my sister would call a " Vilde meziah ", a crazy bargain. Despite it's humble roots, it's a useful dress that has been worn to many, many off Broadway performances. Having come of age in the golden age of Diane Von Furstenberg , I have always been fascinated by wrap dresses. I also love some vintage patterns I have seen where a wrap dress is cut from one piece of fabric. The idea seemed so elegant design wise. Friday a load of fabric arrived from Fabric Mart Fabrics, including a bundle of knits. One piece in the bundle was a dark blue knit. Using the Walmart dress as a model I began cutting directly into the fabric. I serged the shoulder seams together and tried on my experiment. I could lie and say that the dress was perfect and just needed to have the edges bound. But I cut the armholes far too low. Rather than ditching the project as a low cost failu...

This tallit is being made for a bat mitzvah girl who shares my name. The tallit will be made out of the pictured fabrics, a chocolate brown silk noil and a pink shantung. Sarah loves these colors. With the exception of the colors, this tallit will look far more like a traditional tallit than say Sara Xing's . I ordered the brown silk from the nice folks at Thai Silks. Finding a chocolate brown silk is harder than one would think. I have been buying from the folks at Thai Silks for years. Normally, I might have just ordered the fabric over the internet . But because I needed such a specific shade, I called up and had the person who took my order help me. I wanted a Hershey Bar brown, not a greenish brown, not a yellow brown but Hershey Bar brown. Rosi at Thai compared fabrics for me and sent me just the right color. I was so relieved when I opened the package. When I met with Sarah, we talked about texts that she loves. One of the verses that means a great deal to her comes...

It snowed all day today. Mostly it was light fluffy beautiful snow. This is the view from our living room window. We walked to Staple's to pick up a couple of reams of paper and then to Barnes and Noble to browse. While my youngest read comic books I read through most of a book about Adrian, the designer. Several years ago, Threads Magazine had a terrific article about Adrian. That article made me want to learn a whole lot more. The book was good, but not focused on what I wanted to learn. The Threads article was more design and technique oriented. this book was focused more on movie history--Nice stuff, but not really what I wanted to learn. I'm afraid that I have turned into a complete textile geek.

Yesterday was Sara Xing's bat mitzvah. She did a beautiful job both with her Torah reading and with her Haftarah . I almost fell over as she gave her d'var Torah, her talk . Sara Xing used the tallit as a major focus of her d'var Torah, referring to it again and again. Yowie Kazowie !!! The sanctuary was full. Her talk was deeply moving, talking about her identity as Chinese and American and Jewish. I'm sure that I was not the only person n the room crying. I could not have asked for better publicity, having the smart kid speak so movingly about the tallit . Thank you Sara Xing !!!!

My father died this past September 4, the 4th of Elul on the Jewish calendar. My father, having been a rabbi for 55 years, and having spent so much time sitting with his congregants as they were dying, was very aware of his decline and his approaching death. Our youngest is having his bar mitzvah this March. All last winter, my father knew he wasn't feeling right. He kept telling me , "I will never make it to that bar mitzvah." I thought that he as talking about the difficulty of traveling to New York or his problems with walking. In retrospect, I realize that he knew that he would not be alive . During the summer while my father was hospitalized when my youngest would visit my father he would chant as much of his haftatra as he knew. As he chanted the rest of us would weep knowing that by the time of the bar mitzvah, my father would no longer be alive. After my father died, I decided to make a Torah mantle in my father's memory so that my father's presence would ...

In reality shows, the big moment of drama is the reveal. In makeover shows, the reveal is when the formerly frumpy woman comes out with a cute new shape, sexy clothing, good make up and a great hair cut. So much effort has gone into the transformation, the producers of the shows want to pump it for all of the drama that it is worth. I used to lay out the completed tallit on my dining room table when my clients would come to pick up the piece. I now own, thanks to my friend Andrea, a dress making form. So these days I put the tallit on the dummy, as soon as my clients come into my dining room, there is the tallit. It works like the tallit reveal. When I begin working with a client, I listen hard to what they are saying. I pay close attention to the colors and textures that appeal to them, that make them happy. Often my clients don't articulate their needs in words but by talking to them, watching and listening I can usually get a pretty good idea of what would work best for them. D...