A wristlet for my daughter

If you had asked me before yesterday evening what a wristlet was, I would have answered, that it was a corsage one wears on the wrist.

My daughter is briefly home from college, before she goes off to China. Clearly, this short window of time having my daughter home makes me much more willing to make anything she asks me to make for her. Given the fact that my daughter, like her mother is the sort of person that clothing just sticks to. People give her clothing, because she has so much fun with clothes. At the moment she owns a crazy amount of clothes. So my daughter didn't need me to make her another cute skirt or another silly pair of pajama pants.

She mentioned last night, that she wanted a wristlet. A wristlet in current parlance is a small purse worn on the wrist, say during a party small enough to hold ones essentials while in party mode. In my day, young party going women wore disco bags, so a wristlet is the new millennium version of a disco bag.

I asked my daughter to draw a sketch of what she wanted and to show me on a ruler exactly the size she wanted. She wanted a 5 x7 gusseted bag with a zipper. A 5 x7 index card made the perfect pattern.

I had a suede skin , not from http://www.fabricmartfabrics.com/, but from Art from Scrap in Santa Barbara. I marked my pattern on the wrong side of the suede and cut out the pieces. I then cut a lining out of red cotton canvas. Being a city girl, my daughter needed a pocket for her Metro card. I cut the pocket and then stamped it with a block that I had cut from an eraser.

My daughter had a backpack that was given to her many years ago, and was really not her taste. We dissected the unwanted backpack for it's hardware. I attempted to used the terrific zipper and zipper pull in the new wristlet but I won't go into the head aches caused by trying to re-thread the zipper pull onto the zipper coils, suffice it to say, I gave up and attempted a new zipper that promptly broke. AAARRRGGGHH!!!

I cut new front and back panels out of suede ( after sewing and resewing the panels twice with the zippers that didn't work) and attempted zipper insertion #3, which thankfully, worked. I assembled the rest of the bag including the wrist strap and then assembled the lining. I added a lip of moleskin near the zipper edge and hand sewed the lining into place.

The bag at this point looked lovely but a bit like those man-purses of the '70's. since my daughter had requested the bag for party use, I thought a bit of embellishment was in order. I added foil lined blue glass beads and then strung strands of seed beads around the large rectangular blue beads for a bit more--more.

When my daughter first suggested this project I panicked. A pocketbook seemed like something out of my league sewing-wise. I then realized that this wristlet is simply a small zippered tallit bag made out of suede, with a wrist strap. Sometimes you just need to re-frame the problem in order to solve it.

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

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