sarah in nyc

My new sewing machine arrived. And it is lurvley . It runs smoothly and seems to be well engineered. I love the horizontal spool setting. The too many cute stitches are adorable. the machine comes with some good feet. I will post photos after Shabbat. Now I can start getting to work on on the things I have been putting off since I have been machine-less since June.

Sarah is one of the participants in my never ending Spring tallit workshop. She came by today to finish doing her lettering for the corner pieces, ( the squares) and to outline all of her letters with metallic paint. Sarah is a smart kid who is a deep thinker. She just came back from a Great Books summer camp. ( That would have been my idea of an ideal summer camp when I was a kid.) Sarah does great work but she is very much of a perfectionist and it got in the way of getting this piece done. While Sarah was working I took out a piece that I was working on that needed a bit of help.It felt very companionable with both of us working together. I showed Sarah how to outline the letters using just the tip of the brush, and not the side so she could get a finer line. As she was working she asked me lots of questions about my own work, how I improved. I Talked about how I was not particularly good at making art when I was her age, but by plugging away, I improved. When she worried ab...

I will usually make challa covers in small batches. While they are made at the same time, none are identical. These challa covers all use the same text, from the Lecha Dodi, the poem that is sung Friday evenings at synagogue to welcome the Sabbath. The basic design of a center piece of text on silk bordered with bands of fabric. the end results though are very different. Usually, because these pieces are done while I am working on commissioned pieces, excess fabric from other work is incorporated. Sometimes, techniques from other pieces make their way into the challa covers. Other times, color combinations from museum exhibits make their way into the work. Most of my work is developed with a client. The needs of my shape my work very strongly. The challa covers are a bit more personal in a way. In, them I am playing with ideas that are rolling around in my head. you can see more of them at www.kodakgallery.com/sarahjacobs . When they ask for the prompt, it is sarahspics.

When my oldest was little she used to complain that I was "Driving her to crazy." That is in fact where this foot pedal odyssey has driven me. At noon, New York time, I called the lovely Carl at www.vac&sew.com . He talked me through opening up the foot pedal so I could attach it to the electrical wires. As he asked me to describe the innards, it was clear that I had a model that he was unused to. So Carl had the brilliant idea that I send him a digital photo of the circuit board. I did. I got one of those annoying postmaster messages that the message was too large. I tried several different ways of sending the message to Carl. In desperation, I had my husband send Carl a message...that too got a postmaster message. I called Carl. He tried to send himself an email. His email was broken. So that was an hour wasted. I then posted the photo here on my blog, and sent Carl to look at the photo. Now he was ready to resume instruction. I got out my needle nose pliers, and wir...

I had ordered a new foot pedal from a lovely sew & vac operation in California. They had to special order the piece and splice it to the power cord. I got an email from them ages ago saying that it had been Fed-Exed to me. so far so good. I unearthed my sister's circa 1971 Kenmore machine and began using that, until THAT foot pedal too bit the dust. So I was back to waiting for the foot pedal from California. So every day when I go to pick up my mail in the lobby, I ask the doorman if I have any packages. occasionally, there were packages, but none were the foot pedal. It's a little hard to sew without a sewing machine. There are lots of things that a serger can do, but I really need my machine. Yesterday I called the sew & vac people in California, they promised to get back to me. Today I called Fed-Ex. I called to sew & vac people back today. Apparently, Fed-Ex had picked up the foot pedal, and got it as far as a facility ten miles away, and there it had been hang...

Like every self respecting parent, I scour the photo pages my son's camp sets up for parents, for photos of my son. I had noticed that my son was photographed sans glasses in each of the photos. Having been a mom for a while, I deduced that either the glasses were lost, or they were broken. When we saw our son on Sunday, my first question was " So what's with the glasses? Lost or broken?" The glasses were not lost. But my son had left them on the ground and a fellow camper had stepped on them. They were badly bent( Do you mean to say that the ground is NOT a good location for glasses???) We then planned to visit the optometrist to see if the glasses were salvageable. As I was loading the wash from the washing machine and into the dryer, I saw a something truly terrifying, my son's glasses case. Yes, his glasses were inside. The lenses had a bit of a soap film on them, but they looked intact. My son tried them on. They were no longer bent. The spin cycle seemed...

We picked up our youngest from his first session in camp yesterday, Sunday. He goes back on Thursday to the same camp. This means that I get to spend the next few days doing laundry like a mad housewife. His delightful camp sits in a swampy corner of New York State. The kids have a wonderful time, I can't say enough nice things about his camp, but all of their clothing very quickly becomes repulsive. As soon as my son gets home, I start washing everything on the "superwash" cycle of my machine. As soon as the clothes are washed, dried and folded, my son repacks his duffel bags. My sister insists that camps give kids leg vitamins. My son noticed that he is now as tall as the fridge. This is a new development. I just measured the fridge, it is 5 ft 3.25 inches. From the looks of this photo, my son is now 5 ft 4 inches tall. He may now be taller than his sister. My poor daughter is now the shortest member of our family. A bitter pill for an oldest child to swallow.

The silk for Hannah's tallit arrived yesterday. The colors are beautiful, but the darker color is much darker than it was in my sample book. I suppose I could have called up my silk supplier and screamed ant yelled at them. Actually, I hadn't thought of doing that, nor do I think it would have helped a whole lot. They can't create a color that they don't have in stock. Instead, I realized that if I bordered the darker silk with the silver shantung that we are also using in this piece, the color balance Hannah was looking for would be restored. I don't think that Hannah will mind that she is getting a fancier, more complex stripe than what I had sketched out. I am still awaiting my new foot pedal, so there is only so much work I can do with just the serger. I'm getting itchy for that foot pedal. I can't wait to really be able to get back to work.

The hallways in my building are getting painted. This morning I got home from services to see the painters plastering the higher sections of the walls and the ceiling wearing stilts. I guess that is is more economical and a better use of time than issuing the workers a ladder. I love the complete goofiness of it and wonder about the person who invented these worker stilts.

The woman I making the Psalm 104 tallit is a repeat client. I had made her this tallit bag a long time ago. I remember working with my client, but I had no recollection of the bag itself. Yesterday she sent me photos of the bag. I had zero recollection of it. Yet, I have fond memories of the fabrics. Those I remember well. I am more than a little astounded at the amount of labor that I put into the bag. The bag is a riot of embellishment techniques. I see lots of applique and reverse applique, not to mention the beading. I also see the distinct influence of Bird Ross. I think I had seen an article by her in Threads magazine ad was blown away by her work ( that's the reason for all of those nifty squares at the edges of the piece). I see that the bindings were hand dyed. I think that visually my work is more sedate these days. I don't know if that is always a good thing. I am self taught. At the point that I made that bag, I was really confidant in my skills in embellishing fab...

My next tallit is a great thing for a text geek like me. The stripes are being made up of ( hopefully) most of Psalm 104. The Psalm is one of the ones which talks about the glory of nature expressing the divine. Both the language and the imagery are fabulous. My client is a serious bird watcher. My client has unfortunately been struck with a bad case of Lyme Disease which keeps her close to home. As I calligraph the text I keep thinking about how these verses send my client's imagination outside of her four walls and out into the universe. These strips are 5 inches tall by 54 inches wide. Each strip will be folded in half. The tallit will be 27 inches wide. We recite this Psalm at the end of services at the New Moon. By the time you get to this great Psalms though, you are so ready to go home, entirely sick of services. I try to pay close attention to the words, but other folks at morning services are late for work, so inevitably, we rush through the Psalm. It's nice to be ab...

My client came to pick up the "old shul" tallit. As she examined the velvet corner pieces, my client laughed and asked if I had been in her childhood synagogue in Dayton. Sometimes what a client wants is a sensibility in the finished object, something that is hard to put into words. What I need is a key to understand what that feeling is. Luckily, I was able to understand what "old shul" meant to her. Old dusty synagogues that have fallen on hard times often have a sense of a bit all of the poeple who have sat in those seats and remains of their prayers settling into the dust that emerges as you bat at the faded velvet cushions. My own synagogue, now beautiful and renovated, for a very long time had that sense of ghosts from the past hanging around. I tried to find images of the interior of by client's childhood synagogue, unfortunately, google couldn't find any for me. So if you want to get the old shul sensibility, find a synagogue built before WWII., If...

The foot pedal on my reliable Pfaff bit the dust. I ordered a new pedal and cord from a lovely sew and vac place in California. because work still needs done, I pulled out my sister's circa 1973 Kenmore sewing machine. After three days, the foot pedal on my sister's machine bit the dust as well. How's that for weird. The Kenmore hasn't been used regularly in nearly 20 years, although I have had it tuned up and cleaned. It actually did work well for three days. I am not a happy camper. I called the lovely sew and vac people in California. My new pedal will be here by next week.

Our friends Naomi and Mike just had their first baby. Mike taught my kids music for years. I decided to make their baby girl a dress. Some of my old sewing books have thrifty sewing projects that include making little girl dresses out of a man's shirt. you can see modern takes on the same idea on some of the many crafty sites on the web. One of the nice thing about making a little girl dress out of a man's shirt is by using the button front as the back of the dress, you save yourself the tedious job of making button holes and sewing on buttons. A visit to my favorite thrift store yielded a lovely blue floral Tommy Hilfiger shirt. None of the guys in my family would wear such a thing, but it was perfect for a baby dress. When folks see my work, they will often say " Oh, you are so talented. Sewing must come so naturally to you." In fact, the opposite is true. it is not easy for me to learn the things that I do and some things have taken years to learn. I have been read...

The "old shul" tallit is finally done. It has been a long road, but I think that the results are well worth it It does has the look of old synagogue furnishings, and will in fact be worn in a beautiful of shul.