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 an iron. Right now, they all smell slightly fishy. The way a food services worker's hands do after putting out platters of smoked fish for a crowd. Luckily, the smell dissipates after several hours. But it took me a while to understand why I kept seeing waitresses in black nylon dresses in the stainless steel kitchen of Temple El in Quincy, in my mind's eye, as I was trying to find the right words to describe the smell of the curing paint sticks.

I will need to assemble this tallit and put some work into the atara.

Like always, I have a few projects going at once. I have also begun work on an invitation for a client. It is promising to be a fun piece. I also have several other tallitot that are in various stages of design or construction.

Do most of you just work one piece at a time into completion? or do you work like I do, on several pieces at a time?

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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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