evolution of a baby dress

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 reading instructions on how to do smocking probably for the past 15 years. I have made several botched attempts to smock during that time. despite my failures, I decided that I would smock a dress for Naomi and Mike's baby.

I grew up wearing smocked dresses. I remember that when I was abut 5 or so seeing my friend's mother, Mrs. O'Hare smocking in her living room. The O'Hares like most of the other families in my neighborhood were a large Catholic family. My family with three kids was teeny in comparison with most of the families on the block. The O' Hares had nine kids. The O'Donnell's next door to them won the big family prize on the street with eleven kids.

Mrs. O'Hare smocked one dress for each of her kids as a Christmas present. That year it was my friend Meggie's turn to get a dress smocked for her. I didn't know that either smocking, or even dressmaking was something that an actual person could do.

After I visited my OB-Gyn to take the pregnancy test that confirmed that I was pregnant with my second, I stopped by the Madison Avenue boutique, Magic Windows that specializes in smocked garments for Park Avenue children. On the clearance rack I found a smocked romper for a baby boy. It is the sort of idiotic garment that one can not put on a baby boy outside of New England or outside of Park Avenue.To eyes not used to that sort of a thing...it looks like girl clothes.

I was indeed pregnant with a boy. And yes, I did have him wear it on his first Rosh Ha Shanah. OK, so everyone in my synagogue all thought that I had lost my head and put my son in girl's clothing, but I knew I was upholding goofy New England traditions.

So all of this by long way of introduction to the importance of putting babies in smocked garments.

For the technical end of things, I marked a series of dots on the reverse of the fabric a centimeter apart. I took a teeny stitch under pairs of those dotted markings and gathered them together two dots at a time and secured with a back stitch. After five rows of gathered markings, i embroidered over the front The entire process was much less time consuming than I had anticipated.. Now I have to construct the dress, sewing front to back and edging the hems.

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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