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Showing posts from February, 2009

Descriptive words

A psychology text I read many years ago talked about how small children often use very specific and personal imagery as descriptors, not realizing that the person they are speaking to may not have any idea what the child is speaking about. In the example used, the child was shown a photograph of a puddle of water. The surface of the water was ruffled by the wind. The child described the puddle as reminding him of "sheet". The adult tester was assuming a freshly ironed sheet on a freshly made bed and felt that the child's answer was incorrect. The child was thinking about his crumpled sheets in the morning. When I read that so many years ago, I imagined the child's face close to those crumpled sheets just as his eyes were opening in the morning, those wrinkles close up to his opening eyes. I found his description wonderfully evocative. Although that psychology book assumed that those sorts of deeply personal descriptors are replaced by more general, universal ones, I h...

Monday is often...

ironing day. this morning I ironed this stack of four table cloths. The bottom one is about 120 inches long and we just used it Friday . It's a cotton rayon damask blend,that I had made, and not all that difficult to iron despite it's huge size. The next cloth up in the stack is another one which I made. It is a cotton pique, with multicolor pom pom fringe. My friend Mary Katherine loves pompom trim and gave me a bunch of random lengths from her collection. They all trim the cloth. Yes, the look is pretty silly. This cloth fits our dining room table in it's unexpanded size. It is about 90 inches long. Next up in the stack, is a cloth made out an Ikea print. It has a Matisse like look and is pretty horrible to iron. The only consolation is that it looks great on the table and terrific with our dishes. This too is for the unexpanded table. The top cloth is one of the many vintage cloths I inherited from my mother in law. It is a 52 inch square of cotton, also not so great to...

free or nearly free...

Here is my new dress with two different cardigans . The spotty one was given to me in a bag of hand me downs by my neighbor Oscar, who keeps my entire family looking spiffy. The sweater is part of a twin set. Wearing both together is too much of too much in my book. But I adore it with the smaller scale dotty look of the snake skin print. The grey sweater is a new purchase for me. I have been thrifting since my last year of college.The church here on Broadway and 96 th street ( St Francis of Assisi ) has a great thrift store if you like searching for jewels. That is, it is a great chaotic mess of garbage and terrific stuff. Long ago, I learned that the better edited a thrift store is, the better the stock, but the more you will pay. This store is not edited at all. The previous manager had a great pricing policy. If you were a regular, he would charge you $2 per item, no matter what the marked price. He left St Francis to go to business school. I keep thinking that it might hav...

a dress on the side

My friend David's mom died just after my mother in law died. She was one of those terrific old time lefty's who wrote poetry, raised money for political causes and sewed. When she died she left lots of fabric. Some of it went to make quilts for wounded veterens. Some I donated to the day care center that my kids used to go to, and some I kept for myself. I found myself falling in love with this snakesnkin cotton knit from the early 1980's. I'm not quite sure why. I think it reminds me of a miniskirt I lusted after when I was in my early 20's. Instead of a miniskirt with many zippers, I made my version of a twist front bodice dress. Creating this twist front involved slicing and dicing and recombining the bodice. If there are requests , I can post a tutorial. I like how the twist gives the bodice a bit of shaping. The dress looks better on me than it does on the dummy. My neighbor gave me a black white and grey animal print sweater that looks very cool with the dres...

tallit progress

Well, my son's tallit progresses. I backed the striped elements with a blue silk that I had purchased at the late lamented Tessutti. Tessutti was one of the many garment district stores that is no more.They sold high end fabrics at high end prices. They used to sell Zip -Lock bags with remnants of fabric. I had purchase this blue silk about 15 year ago. I'm so happy to be using it in my son's tallit. I backed the stripes with the silk for two reasons, the first is so you don't see raw seams on the underside of the tallit. The second reason I back the stripes is because of a quirk of mine. Woven tallitot have patterns that are visible no matter how you wear the tallit. It always bothers me when the underside of a tallit is too quiet. What you see here in the photos is both unpressed with unfinished edges. Yes, I will give my son a cleaned up tallit. My son loved how the tallit looked, but I see that the silk causes the tallit to slip when it is worn. Bleh!!! My old...

A morning at Sotheby's or what I would buy if I had an extra $40 million kicking around

These two images are from an astounding collection of mostly printed Judaica that is for sale at Sotheby's . http://www.sothebys.com/ The sale is taking place this Thursday. Jack Lunzer a dealer in industrial diamonds amassed this collection that chronicles the history of the printing of Jewish books. Sotheby's arranged this massive collection partially on shelves organized by city of printing with shelves reaching up to the 20 foot ceilings. The exhibit sort of replicates the sense one has seeing these books in the home of their collector. I went to the exhibit partially just for the pleasure of seeing and also because I have an invitation commission. The invitations is to have the look of old Jewish illuminated manuscripts. I had worked out a couple of decorative elements. I wanted to be sure that I was on the right track. As I wandered through, I looked at old Haggadot , volumes of the Talmud, broadsheets and was sort of delighted to see that the inexpensive student edi...

How my days begin

Since my father died I have been going to morning minyan every day. I hadn't been going to services daily since I graduated from high school in 1978. In those days, when I went to services in school, I davened behind a mechitza . When I davened at my home synagogue, although I didn't daven behind a mechitza , services were still not egalitarian. While I was an enthusiastic participant, I didn't have the opportunity to lead services. I have led services occasionally in the intervening years. In the terror of standing before the ark, my voice has often come out pinched, choked and a little weird. It has been difficult for me to pace my breathing so that I could sing smoothly, and lead others comfortably. My synagogue is egalitarian, men and women lead equally. Like my father, or more accurately to honor my father, who was always on time, I try my best to be at services just before they start. That means, I'm often called upon to lead. Leading over and over, during the...

A dress for me to wear at my son's bar mitzvah

About a year before my daughter's bat-mitzvah, SSS sample sale, a terrific clothing loft in the garment district wad a huge sale. I bought a black suit with tuxedo like details made out of black stretch wool. it looked terrific and cost nearly nothing. I wore it to her bat - mitzvah. Before my older son's bar mitzvah, I had bought several black and white striped silks. I thought I would make myself a pieced dress with the stripes going in every direction. Since I taught my son, made his tallit, made his tallit bag and invitation and did the flowers.. I sort of ran out of team and never did make that dress. Instead I wore a great 1940's inspired wrap dress by Zelda that gives me-- even post three kids -- a wasp waist. Now that bar mitzvah #3 is around the corner I have dress visions dancing in my head. I regularly check out the vintage clothing sites. I also have a large collection of vintage sewing books. One concept that I have seen in dresses from the 1920's on is a s...

Trimming the Torah mantle

Most Torah mantles have some sort of trimming at the top. Most also have fringe at the bottom. Some of this decoration is there because the Torah is dressed sort of like the High Priest, the Kohen Gadol. When I started making mantles though, I realized that some of the trim is there for functional reasons. Very often when you make the mantle, you pad the wooden frame and then and stitch the "skirt" to that padded frame. Inevitably that join will be imperfect. The trim at the top hides any lumps in the join. Today I went trim shopping. This isn't an off the rack sort of a Torah mantle and I didn't want off the rack trim. Often people use upholstery trim. I didn't want to use just silver, because I thought it would look too cold. I wanted something that would pick up the colors that I had used. I also have a less than lovely join to hide so I needed a bit of width. I thought that if I layered standard trims I would get the look I wanted. When I purchased the velvet...

What I see when I look out the window

This is what I see when I look out of the windows of our apartment. One of my friends from the Creative Machine list wrote to me about how she likes to hear about my life here in New York. Part of our apartment faces Broadway. This is what you see when you look out of those windows. Most of our apartment though, faces the back wall of the building next door. The building next door was built several years before ours, and used to be a classy place. For the past at least 30 years it has been an SRO, a single room occupancy hotel. Most of the residents were recently released from mental hospitals or jails. Needless to say, our windows that face out neighbors are all curtained--all of the time. I never wash those windows. Recently, though, the SRO has been renovated for formerly homeless families. I hope that our new neighbors are quieter than the former tenants of the SRO. Our former neighbors were very much a part of our lives. We heard their music, their fights and what they watc...

Back to the Torah Mantle

I have been working on making a Torah mantle in memory of my father. The goal is to have it complete and debut, so to speak, at my son's bar- mitzvah at the end of March. When I last updated about the mantle , I thought it was nearly done. I took a closer look and realized that I was NOT happy with several aspects of the mantle . The top was insufficiently padded. It felt sort of skimpy. I had attempted to sew the mantle in one piece, making a row of trim at the join between the top and the skirt unnecessary. The result rather than being smooth, was pretty lumpy and unattractive looking. It was in short, not by best work. So this morning I had to do my least favorite thing , un -sewing. I took the mantle apart. As I was clipping all of my stitches, I remembered my father's tallit. My father who loved nothing but the finest, had comissioned a wool tallit to be woven for his 70th birthday. About two or three years ago, my father asked me how to wash the tallit. I talked my fathe...
My sewing student showed up this afternoon, delighted by her success with her top and raring to make a dress. She found a chartreuse knit in my stash, from a knit bundle from http://www.fabricmartfabrics.com/ . (The actual color is less bright than the more stridently colored photo but brighter than the darker photo.) My student thought that it would look terrific made up into a dress with a woven bodice. The rational part of me was thinking, this kid has had maybe eight sewing lessons. I have never done such a thing. And it isn't an easy thing to figure out. Maybe this isn't the best idea in the world. I warned my student that this will be hard and that if I were a normal sort of a sewing teacher I would say no to this idea which is probably past her current skills. My student, though was undaunted. First I had to figure out how to engineer a woven bodice. Thankfully, my student was willing to have just the front of the bodice be woven. She was also ready for the weaving to b...

bread tutorial --part 3

bread tutorial --part 2

bread baking tutorial part 1

There has been a discussion on Pattern Review, http://www.patternreview.com/ about bread machines and making peasant type bread. I do lots of bread baking. Given that we live in an apartment, I don't like owning a whole lot of equipment. It just takes up too much room. This bread is basically idiot proof. My kids can, and do make it without very much intervention from me. This is a vatiation on the no - knead Mark Bittman bread what has been creating a buzz on the internet. I have two problems with the Mark Bittman formula. The first is that when I followed his directions to the letter( Yes, I actually can follow directions to the letter, I just often improve things as I move along.) The results were often fermented tasting. Not pleasantly soured like sour dough but fermented and kind of yukky. My other issue is that the dough is just plain repulsive to touch when the time comes to form the loaf. Not to get too graphic but when i followed his recipie, the dough was the consistancy...

What I did today ( aside from laundry, updating address lists , going to morning minyan, making lunches, breakfasts...)

Today, I worked on making stripes that looked like water for my son's tallit . I cut two stencils out of index cards, after first drawing simple wave shapes on the cards with a pencil I used two different shades of blue oil paint sticks with an occasional, sparing use of yellow, and a slightly more aggressive use of white. This took a while, and doing this sort of repetitive work for a long period of time gets me slightly zoned out. By the time I am done, I feel like I have been under water for a long time. Shifting from seeing the piece from a myopic perspective to seeing it the way other folks will, is always a surprise. It always amazes me when it actually looks good. So many of the small bits offer so many opportunities for unhappiness. But the whole always looks better than it's individual parts. These stripes really do have the look of a river. I finished the willowy stripes as well. I have to let all of these strips sit for a couple of days before I set the color with a...

Today's weather

snow...Perfect light fluffy snow that didn't even stick.

Some of the people in my neighborhood...

When I moved to the Upper West Side in 1982, this neighborhood was much more on the edge than it is now. When my husband moved here a few years before, some folks wouldn't visit him because he lived north of 91st street. By the time I moved here it was somewhat safer, ( even scaredey cats came up to 96 th street--and in those days I didn't go north of 122 nd ) but there was a cast of folks one saw on the street on the regular basis. One of my favorites was a man I called "Onion Head". He always wore paint and plaster spattered clothes and wore an mesh onion sack as a veil over his face. Another member of the cast of characters was the woman I called "White Hotel". She looked just like one of the covers for the novel. Her long hair was sprayed straight up above her head for about half a yard. It was pretty impressive.I always wondered what brand of hair spray she used. I haven't seen either "Onion Head", or "White Hotel" in years. B...

Sewing Lessons

For the past several weeks I have been teaching sewing to an 11 year old girl. We meet about once a week. My student's mother is an artist and a very cool dresser and my student has a pretty sophisticated sense of fashion. My student had been sketching lots of clothing and wanted to make the garments she was thinking about. My students mother and I travel in the same circles, and she asked me to teach her daughter to sew. I know that most sewing curricula have one start by having the student sew the lines on lined paper until they learn how to sew straight lines. I thought that it might be a better idea to start making clothes and then have the experience of sewing teach you how to sew straight line. One of the things that I had been working on teaching myself for the past few years is how to sew without a pattern. Basically I have been attempting to recreate a lost skill using bits of oral knowledge passed down by the grown children who saw their mothers sew in this manner, but ne...

the workshop

Well, last night I had anxiety dreams that no one would show up at the workshop. Luckily, my dreams did not come true and four families showed up. We studied the texts around putting on a tallit so that we were all on the same page about the significance of a tallit . I brought in a bag full of different kinds of possible tallit fabrics ( mostly silks of different weights and weaves with one wool thrown in for good measure). The kids all tried on the different silks and selected what they wanted to make their tallitot out of ( no one wanted the wool). It always stuns me. If you throw a bunch of fabric at a kid, there will be one that they will hug to their bodies. They stand up straight and they just begin to beam. That is the right fabric for their tallit .The kids loved feeling the silks but it was so clear which the right fabric was for each participant. The slower, more fraught decision was choosing the color. Then I had to measure each kid. The tallit has to work for about th...

tallit workshop

Today is a big teaching day for me. This morning I am going to start a Tallit making workshop at my synagogue, and I teach my sewing student in the afternoon. Actually, more accurately, I hope that this will be a big teaching day for me. As of Friday, only one person had signed up for the Tallit workshop but all during services Friday night, and yesterday, people came up to me to talk about the possibility of taking the workshop. So either I w ill be working with one person or, I will have a crowd. Frankly, I'm hoping for a crowd. I like teaching. I love creating a setting where the class becomes a cohesive group, encouraging each other, offering suggestions and pushing each other to produce better and more interesting work. You need a critical mass of people to create that sort of an environment. This workshop is open both to adults and kids. I know that some people can't see working with both adults and kids together. I love the mix of early adolescents and adults. The ki...