Skip to main content

My sister





LOVED the refashioned sweater. I mailed it Friday, and it arrived today. She loved the color. Loved the ruffle. I love making people happy.

This Eileen Fisher silk sweater began life as an aggressively happy geranium pink wide v-necked sweater. The pink would have worked in a county club. It did not work for my sister.

The shape of the sweater and the neck was hugely unflattering. My sister and I are built fairly similarly. It looked awful on me. It made me look super-wide.

First I dyed the sweater using a purple dye. It calmed that chipper pink right down. I can pretend that I knew exactly the color that would result. I didn't but, I had the feeling that anything would be an improvement. I was right. This mauve is lovely and will look good on my sister.

My sister didn't give me any instructions about what she wanted. On the one hand, freedom is a nice thing. On the other hand, I actually like having lots of parameters in my work. All those limitations are actually really helpful in my design process. Lots of rules really sparks my imagination and gets me thinking really creatively. I know, it's counter intuitive but it's how I work best, ideally with a couple of sets of needs that on the surface entirely contradict each other. ( But then my bent brain comes to the rescue and I can make two contradictory things co exist in peace.)

The hardest part was figuring out just the right edging for the sweater. I think I made five different attempts until I stumbled onto the brown chiffon. The brown and the mauve looked like friends. They played well together.

Love making my sister happy.

Comments

  1. goodworks1May 1, 2009 at 3:24 PM

    Nice work! I totally agree with you about having parameters, especially when they are 'contradictory'! I guess it gives our brains something to do with all that natural internal twisting! ;)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more