sarah in nyc

Some people drink when they are stressed. Others, eat chocolate. When I am stressed, I make clothes. (Well, I also eat, but not chocolate) A couple of summers ago, as my mother-in -law was going into what we later realized was her final decline, I was lucky enough to discover  Kabballa Man and his trove of wonderful fabrics at less than $5/yard. I remember the difficult day where we got my mother-in law out of the horrible hospital where they were doing their level best to kill her, and into a better facility. We started that day early in the morning, and I finally got home at midnight . The next day I went downtown to Kabblla Man's and went wild.. After a frantic bout of retail therapy, my wallet was about $80 lighter and I had lots of fabric to play with. As my mother-in-lawgot sicker and sicker, and the decisions we had to make got harder and harder, I produced more and more garments.Everything I made during that period had a 1970's vibe to it. I realize in ...

Today our youngest graduated from middle school. For so many years, I was the mother of young kids. That is now no longer true. I am now the mother of old kids. All of them are old enough to baby sit. Right after graduation, my husband picked up a car and drove my youngest to camp. We are now down to just two kids at home.

  Many years ago, my niece referred to the sorts of clothing that vegans might wear as "vegetarian clothing". Normally I don't wear vegetarian duds. However, it's really hot and sticky out. It's too hot to wear the knit dresses that I usually wear. I purchased the fabric for this dress at the African market on 116 Th Street several weeks back. The women I bought the fabric from, seemed shocked that I would be making the dress myself. Many of the printed African fabrics come with a really heavy dose of sizing. I think the fabrics work better for head wraps in their stiff unwashed state. Although I find the shiny sizing glaze on the fabric to be attractive, I really did want the dress I was planning to make to actually have a bit more drape. I washed the fabric and it has the weight and hand of a coarse quilting cotton. That's still just fine for a summer dress. Next, I had to decide what the dress would look like. Last seek I purchased "Design ...

Today is hot and sticky. And it isn't even noon yet. Realizing that the day that the day would only get worse, I decided to deal with the growing mountain or ironing even before I showered today. Today's stack of table cloths, from top to bottom : White linen cloth embroidered by my cousin's mother in law. I love the basket of fruit embroidery. the crocheted edging in multicolored cotton yarn, less so.I also love how well the cloth takes to ironing. Just below that, Ikea upholstery cotton that I made into a table cloth a few winters back. Then a pink linen that came from my mother's stash.I hate ironing that cloth It's just hard to get a nice press on that one. We stopped using that cloth when I was five or so. Nostalgia is the only reason I use the cloth. It reminds me of our then pink kitchen and the Formica table with it's matching wire chairs. My mother is big on setting an elegant table.I tend to set a funky table. I don't have elegant dishes. mine a...

 When I was in college, my friend Alan used to tell us how his family fortune was based on a patent held by his grandparents. The patent was for a material that could be used to create machine made lace. This material could be stitched to recreate traditional lace patterns and then when the stitching was complete, the material could be washed away leaving the lace like fabric. My friend Alan used to say that this is what created the lace table cloth industry. Now, it is possible for home sewers to purchase the same sort of stuff. It has been on the market for a long time. It is sold as wash away stabilizer. When you pull the roll out of the package the stabilizer feels like a rubbery plastic.when it gets wet it feels like gelatin. Over the years I have read several articles about using the fabric to create not just traditional looking lace, lots of people use machine embroidery motifs to do just that but wilder more organic looking lace similar to the work of the designers tha...

of the Ultrasuede challa cover. I added lots more flowers, many of them with my pretty little forget-me-not stamp that I carved out of an eraser. I used Shiva paint stick with the stamp. I love how I can add shading to the stamp. I also painted in lots of details by hand. It never fails to amaze me how a little bit of color variation makes a leaf or flower look much more natural. I had decided to carve the edge of the edge of the challa cover with a tool I had bought at Michael's. It is an X-acto blade attached to a heating element. I purchased it with the hopes that it would create a really clean edge. Perhaps the Ultrasuede was too thick for the blade, but I found using it to be really frustrating. So I pulled out my trusty soldering iron and found that despite the fat point on the soldering iron, I got a cleaner edge with that tool. I painted a line of blue around the edge to show that the meandering edge is in fact intentional. Now I have to wrap up the challa cover and mak...

We are going to a wedding next weekend. The groom is the son of dear friends and is a pretty amazing human being. His bride is his match in the wonderful department. Last night I got to work on a challa cover to make as a wedding gift. The text comes from a liturgical poem recited Friday nights in synagogue. In the poem, the Sabbat is referred to as a bride, it seems like a fitting line to use on a wedding gift challa cover. I decided to use Ultrasuede for this piece. It feels so good to paint on Ultrasuede. I also like that it is so easy to care for. Once the colors are set, the challa cover can be hand washed like a pair of stockings and hung up to dry. It's beautiful, isn't it? Actually it looks great, unless you can read Hebrew. I must have gotten distracted while I was doing the calligraphy. When my husband came home, he immediately noticed that I had left out a letter. AAARRRGGGHH!!! I thought about cutting the border out  and then redoing the lettering. I seemed quic...

My son came back from his nine months in Israel raving about sweet chili sauce. During the year he lived in three different apartments and he did lots of cooking. My son loves food. So he talked about the magical qualities of this sweet chili sauce that makes everything taste better, like barbecue sauce does. Earlier this week, my son and my daughter went on an adventure top Chinatown. One of the stops on this adventure was at Kam-Man the Chinese grocery store, for the food my daughter missed from her sojourns in China and with the hope that my son could find something similar to the fabulous condiment he had discovered in Israel. The adventure was a successful one. My son brought home  this bottle of sweet chili sauce from Thailand. My kids were delighted by their adventure and made dinner to celebrate. My daughter made a vegetable stir fry. My son, meatballs using the chili sauce. It was as good as he had promised. Yesterday I decided to make another batch of babaganou...

My usual post Shabbat lunch activity is going to the library. This week this new Martha Stewart book was on the shelf and I decided to take it home. Martha Stewart is the master of re-cycling. What I mean by that is that she is very good at taking ideas that have been out there for a long long time and re-packaging them as her own . The beautiful photography helps a whole lot. What I find the most irritating about Martha's approach are projects like the beautiful no-sew Ultrasuede wrap skirt. It is so easy that a beginner might think about attempting it. The only  thing is, that Ultrasuede retails for about $60 per yard. How many beginners would be comfortable shelling out $120 for a beginner project? One of the projects is a child's dress made out of a man's dress shirt. My 1940's sewing books are filled with projects , including little girl dresses made out of men's dress shirts. One sees similar projects in the hippie inspired craft books of the 1960's and ...

My husband had given me this lovely necklace as a gift several years back. It looks great on and I wore it anytime I needed to look dressed up. The necklace broke a couple of years ago. I felt terrible about it, and carefully sotred away all of the broken pieced of the necklace, but hadn't gotten around to repairing it. Today I took out my box of jewelery supplies and got to work. The beads are so large that it was quick work. I strung the necklace on coated wire and then crimped five beads on either end to hold the whole thing together. This nifty necklace was a Chanukah gift this year. The links are all made out of different types of chain. This necklace looks great worn as one long loop , looped around my neck tow or three times or even as a Y-shaped necklace. One of the links had fallen open and the clasp had fallen off. I reattached the clasp with new jump rings and repaired the broken chain with a smaller, finer jump ring.

Son #1 returned from nine months in Israel, earlier this week. One of our family practices is that a returning child gets to choose both the guest list and the menu for their first Friday night back home. Son #1 took this responsibility seriously. Several emails went back and forth about the guest list. The menu needed   more direct communication. His choice was flanken ribs cooked in barbecue sauce. I don't know what flanken is called in English, but these are big fat beef bones with a bit of meat and fat attached. After we eat the flanken ribs our table looks like a family of cavemen has just finished a meal. Since Son #1 also invited dear friends who are vegetarians, I had to make sure that they would not be revolted by the stacks of chewed bones that would be part of our meal. Our friends assured us that they would not be offended by our meat feast. Our butcher had only a small amount of ribs on hand yesterday, so I have added meatballs to the meal. Son #1 and I ...

My feet are the bane of my life. I have wide feet, high arches and a high instep. If that isn't enough, my feet swell. Often women will describe their feet as being puffy. I'm not talking puffy, I'm talking fat balloons with little puffy toes at the ends. Summers are especially difficult for me and my sad feet.finding sandals that work is not easy. Usually I wear Born sandals.Mostly they work Earlier in the month, I had purchased a new cute pair, while they fit when they arrived in the mail, I haven't been able to put then on since. . Earlier this week I was out wearing an old standby pair of sandals. .  It was not fun walking around. But while I was suffering, I had an epiphany. I realized that my sandals needed an elastic gusset. I brought two pairs of sandals into the shoe repair store. I described my plight. The repair man had the narrow elastic needed for my new sandals, but he didn't have the wide elastic for my older red pair. I have a huge roll of  wide...

For the next few weeks, all of us will be on the same hemisphere, the same time zone, the same zip code.All under one roof.