Am I the only person in the world who would copy

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 failure I cut deep darts from the bottom of the armhole to the waist line. That solved the too low armhole problem but left me with a new problem. Now the neckline was way too wide, and was in fact kind of indecent. I had no more of the blue knit. I did have a patterned knit mesh in my stash from Kabbala Man. I cut a wide strip and used it to edge the trampy looking neckline.

I now had a red white and blue wrap dress, just the thing to wear when watching the Obama inauguration. So I put my wrap dress on today and watched the ceremony and wept.

I never took sewing as a kid. My sister Abby took a series of sewing classes at the local Singer Sewing machine store. The other day she talked to me about what she had learned in her classes and how the basic attitude of the women who taught her was " There is just one way to make a dress. Any variation is wrong." My sister made some really impressive clothes when she was in High School.

She asked me the other day about how I make clothes. And I began going on and on about how I see each garment as a work in progress . How each element of a garment can be made in an infinite number of ways. How I see sewing as a series of problems to solve with the best possible solution. How some seemingly junky solutions can end up being surprisingly elegant.

My sister said " That sounds like much more fun than the way I was taught." It probably is, although my approach is fraught with it's own brand of anxiety.

I hope that the next four years bring us public officials ready to face our very real problems with a fresh eye, coming up with creative solutions that ultimately work. Yeah... it is much harder to run a government than it is to make a dress but it takes many of the same problem solving skills,

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

Search This Blog