Playing with fiber

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 that sell under the name Rodarte.

I have been fascinated by the idea of making fabric out of thread. I had bought a roll of the wash a way stabilizer a few years ago but had never gotten to use it. I decided to finally try it out. I made these two scarves. the first one I made was the red and black one. The black comes from a roll of silk tubing that I had found in a bin at "Material World" on 39th street. "Material World" is a complete jumble of a store with random rolls of trim displayed in broken down corrugated cardboard boxes.

I had purchased the red silk organza ribbon on EBay several years ago. It wasn't exactly what I had expected to purchase. It shows up now and again in my work. To make the scarf I cut two lengths of the wash a way stabilizer. I at first made the mistake of trying to lay of the yarns for the entire scarf before I began stitching. I discovered that it is better to work 6 inches at a time. But if you think of the stabilizer as the bread of the sandwich and then loop in the yarn six or eight inches at a time, and then roughly sew down the yarn arrangement . you keep adding yarns and stitching them down until your scarf length in complete.

Then you go back and stitched bridged between the open spaces. Yes, this takes lots of thread. Each scarf took three complete bobbins full of thread, and my Janome takes big bobbins. You want the scarf to be stable enough to not fall apart.

After the stitching is complete you wash the scarf in warm water while agitating it with your hands. I used a big kitchen bowl. Then I rolled the finishd scarf in a towel to absorb much of the moisture and let it line dry.

The light scarf is made out of a cotton yarn and a silver lurex yarn.

I know that it is possible to make such scarves just out of sewing threads, but I liked using up some of the yarns in my stash. It's fun obsessive sewing .

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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