Further adventures of the "Old Shul " tallit

Most tallitot have stripes. Most of those stripes fall into one of several possible stripe patterns. You can see some examples that I had sketched out to give Elisa some ideas of the possibilities.

I had already stencilled out the wide stripes, using a commercial architectural stencil. I needed to also do a couple of narrower stripes to work with the wide stencil.

Today, at services my friend Jerry showed me the Megilla that had been illuminated as a gift for him by calligrapher Jay Greenspan. All of the decorative elements in the Megilla scroll were taken from our beautiful synagogue http://www.anschechesed.org/ and reproduced in miniature form. Here was the fabulous Moorish style stencils added to the bimah in the 1940's. There were the images from the stained glass windows in our beautiful chapel.

When I got home I realized that I could create a smaller version of the lovely Florentine stencil I had used for the wider stripes. I then stencilled the narrower stripes with this simplified version of the commercial stencil.

Now you can see both the commercial stencil and my own simplified take on it. Now, on setting the colors and piecing the tallit.

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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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