My way to problem solve

I made this table cloth probably five years ago. It's made out of a black cotton pique. It's edged in pom pom trim. Yes, I know that it is totally silly. My friend, Mary-Katherine grew up mostly in Texas. She was having a pom-pom trim moment. It made her laugh. She was also a fairly constant guest at our table. She asked that I trim my cloth with the pop-poms. It was all the more amusing because I had to use three different colors of trim.

My youngest has been complaining about this table cloth for the past several months. Each time he sets the table for Shabbat using this cloth he points out how spotted it is, and how frequent laundering has not been kind to it.

He is right. The cloth has been looking ratty. I have been hiding it's rattyness by covering the center of the cloth with one of my smaller vintage cloths. The wild 1940's printed cloths look great on top of the black. Today though, I decided to take more drastic measures.

I cut the cloth up into napkins. I used an existing dinner napkin as a pattern and ripped the cloth into napkin sized squares. My serger was threaded all in black and I set it up to do a rolled hem. I remember reading in an old issue of "Martha Stewart Living" that Martha set her mother to work making about 200 napkins for a wedding.

If I were Martha's mother, I would sue for elder abuse. After three napkins I was ready to kill myself. It's just that boring. Since I didn't think that my kid would be very happy to come home to find his mother dead in front of the serger, I decided to make the napkin adventure a tad less boring.

My friend Elizabeth gave me a spool of red and metallic wooly nylon thread. For those of you who don't sew, it's a fuzzy thread that you use in a serger to get a nice soft edge. One of the side benefits of having sewing buddies is that you can give the " What was I thinking ?" purchases to friends who can use them. I have two lengths of fabric that are waiting for Elizabeth. The thread Elizabeth gave me was made to make Christmas stuff, but I figured a little visual stimulation would do me good.

It did. All in all I made eleven napkins. Don't ask me how I ended up with an uneven number of napkins. The set new napkins means that I can demote our more threadbare napkins to schmatta status.

You might ask my I'm wasting my time making napkins when I have actual work to do. My mother always says that she comes up with her best ideas while she vacuums. I have a couple of technical issues to figure out on some of the tallitot on my current work docket. Doing this mindless work gives me time to problem solve.

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Connecting with the past

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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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