sarah in nyc

I'm awaiting a piece of terrible news. I know that it is coming. It is just a question of when. I'm dealing with my anxiety by ironing. The holiday season has provided me with lots of raw material for this anxiety reduction behavior. The cloths I ironed are from top to bottom: 60 x 70 inch 1930's cotton cloth owned by my husband's grandfather 52 x 70 inch 1950's open weave linen owned by my mother 52 x 70 inch heavy Belgian linen embroidered cloth, embroidered by "Grandma Rose" my cousin's mother in law. I think it was made in the 1970's based on the colors used. 60 x 60 Indian cotton block printed cloth purchased at B. Altman, probably in the 1960's. I inherited this cloth when my friend's mother moved into assisted living. 52 x70 linen Vera printed cloth, probably from the late 1960's 45 x 45 hand embroidered cotton rayon mix. Another Grandma Rose cloth. 60 x 84 Ikea cotton. I made this cloth last year. I think of it as Marimek...

In helping to clean out my parent's basement, and my father's study, we came across this book. Actually this is the back of the book. the book itself is a linear translation of the Book of Numbers for schoolchildren. it is translated into Yiddish. The book was published by Joseph Magil in 1899 in Philadelphia. This is a 1922 reprint of the book. The back page is an ad for Joseph Magil's Printing and Book Store. My Yiddish isn't very good but I know enough to figure out this ad. He is selling books. He is tallit tallitot in a wide range of sizes and prices. he also sells tallit bags and tzitzit. He imports books from the great printing centers in Europe, from Vilna, Warsaw, Lemberg and Vienna. He imports bibles, and prayerbooks , Rabbinical discourses and Kabbalistic works. Mr. Magil also will do any printing job in Hebrew, English or yiddish. he will print forms, letterheads, envelopes and cards. I loved that in Yiddish he writes his name in it's full Europe...

Often, when I make challa covers, I will make them in batches. While they are not identical, they are similar, much the way that siblings can often resemble one another. My friend wants to give a gift to a wedding couple. The bride is Jewish, the groom Hispanic. The bride was delighted at the idea of receiving a challa cover as a gift. My friend wanted the challa cover to connect to the groom's Hispanic heritage as well. Using Jewish Imagery from the Spanish Golden age seemed to be the way to acknowledge the intersection of Jewish and Spanish culture. Google Image searches make this sort of research wonderfully easy. I looked at tons of images of synagogues in Spain. I also have some books of Jewish Illuminated manuscripts with lots of examples of images from pre-1492 Spain. So after some time of cyber and regular research I was ready to begin designing. I drew the arch design to size and then lay a sheet of Mylar over my drawing. I then cut the Mylar into a stencil using an E...

My friend Sharon, the serger expert , let me knowing her charming Mid-western way exactly what was going wrong with my serger and why. Thanks to her, I was able to complete the tallit with no more tears. Like so much of my work, as I am actually working, I see the tallit in a completely myopic way. Once it was actually put together, I put it on and thought, " Hey!! what a cool piece!!" My client had mentioned wanting magenta in the tallit. As I would sift through fabrics looking for magenta silk a strip of hand dyed ribbon that I had used in a different piece kept appearing. I kept putting it back into the bag that it emerged from. Yesterday My client and I had a discussion about having an atara or not. We had discussed the possibility of having a line from the Psalm on the atara. As the tallit came together, having the atara be filled with text seemed like over kill. The tallit was so bold, so strong and my client is a small woman. I was afraid that she would be drowning ...

I love Psalm 104. The language is gorgeous. The imagery evoked by the text is beautiful as well. The Psalm is recited on Shabbat afternoons. It is also recited on Rosh Chodesh, at the New Moon. By the time you get to saying the Psalm, you have already added the special blessing for the New Moon, have done halles, the Psalms of praise, done a Torah reading and done the additional service one does for the New Moon. Services, instead of taking 40- 45 minutes are edging towards the hour mark. By the time you get to reciting Psalm 104, you are no longer in the mood for lovely text. You want to get out of services and get home, or go to work, get on with your day. I love the Psalm 104 tallit. It is working out to be a beautiful thing...but I feel like I do on Rosh Chodesh and it is about time to start reciting Psalm 104. My serger is being cranky, and at the moment, so am I...then end is near, and like reciting Psalm 104, I am driving fast past some of the best stuff in the book.

My friend, the therapist, actually, in this neighborhood, that is like saying in Detroit, my friend who works in the auto industry. My friend, was one of the early women wearers of tallitot. Her first tallit, made in the earlt 1970's was simply a length of cotton/poly eyelet with the tzizzit/ritual fringes pushed through some of the eyelets that were near the corners. Many years ago I made her an atara/neckband for that tallit. But after more than thirty years, that eyelet tallit was becoming a bit tired looking. My friend had purchased a new length of eyelet while on a trip to central America. This was a lovely all cotton eyelet with beautiful quality embroidery. If the first length of eyelet was a Chevette, this new eyelet was a Lexus. As I had mentioned earlier. Coming up with the right verses for this tallit was a long and fascinating process. The atara has a line from Psalms that we say as we put on the tallit, " In Your light, we see light." The corner pieces though...

Sometimes, work on a piece really does feel like construction work more than sewing. Right now I am piecing strips made primarily of silk to create a vibrant multicolred stripe between the stripes of text. Each strip of pieced fabrics is fused to a light weight interfacing ( for stability and to help prevent fabric shredding), and then re cut and re-sewn. It's obsessive. pesky work. My new serger is making this much more pleasant than it would have been with my old serger, which had a tendancy to skip stitches and to chew up fabric. Tomorrow I have to pick up more interfacing, and hope to finish constructing the rest of the stripes. After that, it is just a matter of adding in the middle of the tallit and doing the atara...The end is even in sight.

Last week I got on the subway and sat down. the woman sitting next to me turned to me and said, " Do you mind if I ask you a question? ". I thought that she might be trying to hit me up for money, but I told her to go ahead. " I am sixty one years old and have been having vaginal bleeding. Do you think I have cancer? " I hadn't expected that question, and it wasn't like I was wearing a sign that said " Ask me all of your medical questions." I told her that it might be cancer, or it might be any of a number of other things like, a bladder infection or polyps or even something else, but I wasn't a doctor, just a lady on the subway, so she might want to talk to a doctor about that bleeding. So then my seat partner discussed the possibility of going to the ER about her bleeding. I suggested that it might not be the best idea in the world, because ER doctors are probably better at heart attacks, gunshot would and broken bones than they are at gyneco...

Sometimes a bit of obsessiveness is a good thing. I had decided yesterday that just having the verbs from the paragraph that is the biblicalsource for the commandment of Tzitzit/ritual fringes wasn't enough. so I added vines to the center square . Then I fused fleece to more of the same blue/purple silk shantung, stitched the squares, richt sides tugether, and turned them right side out. Yes they looked cute. But they could look cuter. I quilted around both the perimeter and around the inside border of the letters. I realised that the whole thing would be yet cuter, if I just stitched the squares in the middle so the squares would be somewhat free floating. Further cuteness could be achieved if I stiched the center with a beaded flower. It's good my daughter is in China so she couldn't come home and say, " Too much time on your hands, Mama???". It isn't an issue of that at all, but rather more of a case of one idea leading to the next. That and the fact t...