sarah in nyc

With the exception of my microwave oven, I had pretty much had a Luddite kitchen. I own good knives. I also have my trusty wooden bowls and chopping knives. Last Passover I did all of the cooking for Seder at  our friend Bill's house in Philadelphia. Bill is a pretty basic cook. it was something of a challange producing meals for crowds given the cooking tools in his kitchen. He did however have a food processor. I had never used one before. I know, they have been avaialble to the public since the late 1970's. Yes, I am a late adopter. But I can make a really good meal under really primitive conditions. I realized really quicxkly that a food processor is in fact a great thing. as soon as we got home from Bill's, I ran out and bought myself a food processor. I even got us a new one for Passover use. When my big kids were little, I used to make what I called "meatballs with stealth vegetables". I used to chop away at a mess of vegetables until they were an unid...

Maya's tallit requires a fair amount of hand work. One side of the tallit is ocean-ey. the other is cosmos/sky. Maya had dyed the silk for the tallit, green on one side and blue on the other.I had been stitching away on the ocean, and the cosmos was pretty empty. Since  what I am depicting is cosmos, deep space, I lke to have that sense of looking deep into the infinity.  One of the ways to do that, is to layer  the stars and other glittery business. If I were a different sort of a girl I would have planned out each stitch and each bead before I started. But I am not that sort of a girl. I like to have the piece evolve as I work. I could pretend that I need to work that way for some deep artistic reason and put that in my mission statement.  Honestly though if I were simply following a pattern, I would be too bored to work. So riffing on cosmos is the way for me to go. What you are looking at is a mix of machine stitching, hand stitching, beading and se...

One of the current exhibits at the Jewish Museum, called Modern Art, Sacred Space. I went on Sunday. In 1951, the rabbi of the Millburn N.J.  Conservative syangogue decided to cal on the stars of the modern art world to help him create a synagogue that was both deeply Jewish and also expressed the ideas of the abstract expressionists. The architect who designed the synagogue itself was Percival Goodman. Goodman essentially created the vernacular of the post-war suburban synagogue. If you have seen a synagogue in the suburbs you have either seen Goodman's work or the work of one of his imitators. The exhibit is a small one, just two rooms. The piece I really wanted to see was Adolph Gottleib's ark curtain pictured above. I captured the image from the Jewish Museum's website.. Exhibited along with the curtains were Gottleib's sketches. Seeing those sketches was a treat. First of all, I loved the pure sketchyness of those sketches. His cartoons for the ark curtain do...

One of the big secrets in my family, was that my father did much of the cooking. Growing up, my mother's job was to do well in school. She didn't help with cooking or food prep at all. It may have been just as well, because my grandmother was such an awful cook. When my parents got married my mother had two culinary tricks up her sleeve. She knew how to make Jello. She also knew how to make tuna salad. It was a really good tuna salad, but for my father, tuna and jello was simply not life sustainable. My father began to cook. My mother also began to cook more. When I was a kid, I used to help both of my parents as they cooked. My mother did all of the cake baking and anything that needed a delicate hand. She always cooked with a cook book by her side and she followed recipies pretty closely. She would sometimes add a bit more cinnamon or vanilla to a recipe. But she pretty much stuck to what the book said. My mother's cooking was also greatly influenced by the women ...

The garment district has been filled with lots of vibrant knits in scarf prints. They remind me of the clothing that grown up women were wearing during the hippie era. I had gotten a few lengths from remnant bins in the district. This green and pink piece was purchased yesterday at one of the Kabbala-man stores. He charged me $3/yard for it. I actually put some thought into how to cut the fabric so the dress would work on a human body (mine). I realized that probably the easiest, and most flattering way to cut the dress would be to have the long black border running down the center front and back. That was great in theory, but in practice, the fabric was too narrow to cut the back out completely . There was a triangel's worth of the skirt that wasn't in the yardage. I remembered seeing a cutting diagram from a thrifty 1940's sewing book where they showed how to piece the missing triangle of fabric to the bottom of the skirt. I used the black border to help me match the...

Maya's grandmother loved to embroider. She died fairly recently. We are incorporating Savta's embroidery threads and beads into Maya's tallit. Just before Passover maya came by to dye the silk for her tallit. This side is green, water, the other side is blue, sky. Savta's soft gold threads are a pleasure to work with. Often metallic threads can be cranky. I'm couching them to the surface of the silk with a three step zig zag stitch. The brighter thinner gold thread add a bit more dimension to Savta's heaby cording. Yes there is lots more work to do to get the water looking even more watery.  It's fun work to do. I'm thinking about Japanese woodbock prints as I work.

Or a nearly instant skirt. Yesterday, my student brought me three lengths of fabric that she wasn't going to be using. One was a purple cotton jersey. The second was a heavy Victorian red cotton blend bottom weight knit. The third piece was an oddly shaped short and wide piece of bottom weight mauve-ey purple knit. I supply my student with most of the fabric for her lessons and have often given her fabrics that she loved for working on her own. I was delighted that she was willing to share her stash with me. After our lesson I played with the fabric trying to figure out if it was useable, because of it's odd proportions. It was too short to be a skirt on it's own. I realized that if I cut a pencil skirt and added a ruffle, I might be able to pull it off. I measured the fabric around my hips and then cut it to size. Then, I folded the fabric in 1/4 and cut two hip curves. I sewed up those darts/hip curves on my serger. I then cut the remaining square of fabric into on...

Here is Arona's tallit, complete with the tucks. Arona came by last night to try it on, and she was much happier with the fit. I love how the tucks give a tallit-like geometry to the less than traditional eyelet. I also love how the tucks fit in with how eyelet is traditionally worked. In this case, the fix made the tallit better than it was before. I will deliver the tallit to her house later on today.

One of our dinner guests tonight is a vegetarian. Yeaterday I bought a container of tofu, cut it all up, drained the tofu juice and replaced it with a marinade of soy sauce,olive oil,  fresh ginger and  balsamic vinegar. I put it into the fridge to soak it all that good flavor until I would be baking it today. I hate tofu raw. You may as well chew on dish sponges. It is more tolerable soaked in flavor and baked until crispy. I was feeling kind, so I also made a bean salad. I threw two cans of beans into a zip lok, squeezed in the juice of a lemon, added some olive oil mustard and cumin and left it until today to finish off. Last night I was feeling kind of awful. I was freezing cold and was cold despite wearing a wool sweater. I took out a fox coat circa 1968 that a friend had grown tired of, and shivered on the couch under the coat  for the rest of the evening. I even slept in the coat. My husband was kind enough to do the morning shift and let me sleep in. He ha...

Josh and his mother have done lots of travel together. On one pre - Josh adventure to Tibet, Josh's mother bought a skirt that was made partially out of an old silk Ikat dyed weaving to which what looks like , a strip of exuberant Guatemalan cotton hand weaving was added . The body of the tallit is a cross dyed silk shantung. The deep wine color works well with both the nearly neon cotton weaving and the mellow silk weaving. Josh's bar mitzvah portion is the reading that is the source for out wearing a tallit. How great is that for me as a tallit maker? Josh wanted to have the four verbs associated with the mitzvah of tziztit/ritual fringes written on the corners, have, see, remember and do. Yes, I have done this on the corner pieces of other tallitot. I like for my clients to think about the mitzvah of tzitzit while they wear their tallit. When I get the calligraphy right, and the letters interlink just right, it just looks so pretty. It is satisfying visually as well...

These two similar looking prayer books came into my life recently but from two different places. The smaller one came from my in-laws home.It was published in 1921 in New York, by the Hebrew Publishing Company, and is known as a " Kol-bo " which means all inclusive. It has nearly all of the prayers you need to live a Jewish life. The prayerbook comes with a complete English translation. This prayerbook was probably given as a presentation piece, perhaps it was a bar-mitzvah gift given to either my father in law or his brother. But given that my in-laws were pack-rats it may have just ended up in their home.The prayer book is in pristine condition, I don't think that it was used very often. The larger prayer book predates it's smaller cousin by  thirty years and was printed in Europe. It too is a Kol-bo. It has beneath the Hebrew text, a complete Yiddish translation. A friend who collects old Jewish books, gave it to my older son as a gift to mark a big life decisio...

My youngest is skinny. So skinny, that the underpants that he began wearing when he moved out of diapers still fit him until just a couple of years ago. He was still wearing the boxers my daughter made for him when he was six, last summer. Finally he is entering that glorious period of adolescent growth. I'm starting to make him new boxers. My son chose this rayon knit from my stash because it is really soft. The fabric arrived in a Fabric Mart mystery bundle. The elastic, too, came from a Fabric Mart bundle. It even goes with the fabric. I used an existing pair of boxers as the pattern, just a bit longer and a bit wider. He is going off the over night camp at the end of June. I need to get enough made so he can last between laundry weeks. I had made three pairs, but one is currently being worn. No, I am not going to ask my son to model his boxers for my blog.

 My friend celebrated her 50th birthday. I met her through one of my sewing discussion groups. We have become good friends over the years. Her husband threw her a big shindig. I was hoping to go, but since the party was taking place during Passover, I would have loved to attend the party but given that it was Passover, I wouldn't have been able to eat anything. This was a serious food oriented party, so I declined. I did however make my friend a gift. and here it is.I will need to mail it out tomorrow. It is made out of foil lined glass beads, dyed black and white pearls.  It feels nice on. My friend is very pale and blond. I think that the light colors will look beautiful on her. Another friend, also someone I met from the world of sewing, is celebrating her birthday on Tuesday.I was invited to the celebration in Brooklyn. She has reddish hair, and the coloring that many red heads have. The necklace looks more casua lthan the first necklace, but is actually...

Arona was one of the first wave of women to take on the mitzvah of tallit in the 1970's. She took a length of cotton poly eyelet, hemmed it and then tied tzitzit/ritual fringes into the eyelets in the corners. I had made her an atara/neckband about twenty years later. Earlier this year, I made Arona a new version of that tallit. She had purchased some really high quality beautiful  white cotton eyelet in Colombia.  After wearing her new tallit for a while, Arona realized that it was too long. She isn't a very tall person, and she felt overwhelmed in the tallit. She suggested that I simply cut the tallit and make it smaller. I don't like the idea of cutting up a tallit. ( We cut the corners off of a tallit and bury it  with the person who wore that tallit while they were alive.) I also didn't like the idea of a random seam in the middle of the tallit. It seemed like an ugly and clumsy solution to Arona's problem. Instead, I decided to do a series of tucks...

My youngest helped me put away all of the Passover dishes. It was a big job, not as big as getting ready for Passover but still-- a job. It is definately easier getting it done with one big kid rather than doing it with a bunch of toddlers underfoot. The flurry of cooking over  Passover has gotten me thinking about some of the larger issues of domesticity. that and reading the truly excellent The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of the American Myth, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.  In the book, Ulrich explores several different objects created anywhere from the mid 1600's to the early period of the industrial revolution and sets them into their historical context. I hadn't really thought about how the labor of women producing fiber helped the cause of the American Revolution. Apparently, early in the Revolution, women spun in public, in Boston Common to show their support for the Revolution. These displays were followed by militias marching. Both were diffe...

Today was a spectacularly beautiful day. My husband had to go to work. I really did need to work on tax stuff but it was beautiful. I convinced my youngest, who loves to live his life from one of our living room couches, to come out for a walk with me. Believe me, he wasn't eager to get out into the sunshine. We walked down to 72nd street. For me it was fun to see people out in their Easter finery. On our way back, we noticed a crowd around a storm drain at Broadway and 86th. Someone had clearly lost something down the storm drain.  A couple of people were working with a yellow grabbing pole trying to get the lost object. I would have walked by. But this sort of a scene is irresistable to my son. He quickly got himself into the center of the circle of people. A young woman had dropped her cellphone down the storm drain. A very New York crowd of people of various ethnic groups, ages and social groups quickly gathered to give advice and cheer on the the people a...

My past many posts have been entirely about food. Dayenu! Enough! Yesterday I got a call from my synagogue. A Torah mantle, not one of mine, was badly in need of repair. Would I fix it? It turned out to be a nice mindless fix. The "dress" had fallen off of the base. I stitched it back on by hand while I watched TV with my husband and my youngest. That was about the amount of brain power I had yesterday. Our friend, Marcia invited us to join her for dinner. I am supplying some left overs from Seder, some soup, and quinoa. Marcia is making the rest of the meal. She was even nice enough to send her sweet husband over to pick up my contributions to the meal. Today would feel like a vacation day if I weren't working on tax stuff. I also picked up my new glasses. I have been missing the middle distance in my vision for far too long. It made it hard to do things like go to a museum  ( difficult to read those wall notes), or go to the library, I could only look at...

The Seders are over. Our guests have gone home. Yes, I was left bone tired. My mother's mother was a famously terrible cook. My mother, thank goodness didn't learn how to cook from her mother, but from the excellent Lithuanian cooks in Halifax. So the holiday foods we eat come from the culinary traditions of other families. Other Passover traditons come from my family. My mother's father used to sing the entire Haggadah with a truly lovely nusach , or melodic mode. Often these sorts of religious traditions are assumed to be transmitted through the male line. But in my family, my father quickly adopted this lovely tradition. So my sisters and I grew up using the sweet  nusach that underlines the meaning of the text and gets so much of it embedded in our heads. My husband and my children now sing the seder in my grandfather's nusach. My aunt introduced this nusach to her husband as well. Her grandson joined us for seder singing in the same mode, passed ...