A follow-up and more Keeper of the Textiles

I did end up making beaded tassels for the corners of the challa cover. The bling in the corners made the whole thing look truly finished. The piece got picked up today. I packaged it up in kraft paper on a board so it looked all professional. I also included a translation and transliteration of the text so the presenter could look smart. it's always good to make your clients look good. My client was very, very happy.

When I brought the challa cover down to the doorman to be picked up, the latest installation in my being Keeper of the Textiles was being delivered. The photo above is just a detail of the border. This rug was in the dining room of the house I grew up in. Each room and hallway had it's Oriental rug. This rug was my favorite.

I loved the wonderfully ornate border and the really beautiful center medallion. Because my job was to sweep under the table after meals, I had an intimate relationship with this rug. The pile on this rug was so thick that you couldn't use a regular broom, you had to use a short handled broom to sweep the rug. My face used to be close to the carpet as I swept.

I shared a room with one or the other of my sisters growing up. Our house was a quickly built post WWII house with none of the hide-aways that I craved. Some of my friends lived in houses built in the late 1800's or early 1900's. Their houses always seemed to have odd little corners that were perfect for a child to sit hidden away and muse. For a period of time, I used to pretend that under the dining room table was one of those charming corners in an old house and I would lie under the table and trace out the design of the medallion of the rug with my finger. I also remember playing card games with my sisters under the dining room table, in particular, long games of War probably played during the long summer Shabbat afternoons.

One of the things that I always regretted is that this rug with it's exuberant pattern was always hidden by the dining room table. When my mother closed up the house this fall and moved to her new digs, she offered me this rug. I really wanted it, but I was concerned that the clear bright pastels of the rug, which were my favorite colors in childhood, wouldn't go so well with the spicy colors in my living room.

Nevertheless, I arranged to have the rug cleaned by my mother's local rug cleaner. Steve from Low Overhead Carpet and I bonded through our many phone calls. The work on the rug was delayed because Steve's dad had a heart attack. I wasn't exactly rushing to have the rug delivered, because if it wouldn't fit in my living room, I wasn't sure where it was going to live, and I was terrified that it would look terrible with all of the curry and reds in my living room.

So I put down the rug pad myself (Steve sent a great thick pad) and then two porters from the building did most of the heavy work moving furniture and unrolling the carpet. Much to my surprise the sweet Easter Egg colors of the carpet don't look terrible with the spicy colors on the walls and furniture.

When my youngest came home from school he took off his shoes and walked in circles on the rug commenting on how thick and comfortable the rug is. So there it is, another piece of my childhood here on Broadway.

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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