A New Kitchen Table Cloth

About ten years ago, I made a couple of table cloths out of denim from Paron's half price store. This was long enough ago, that the half price store was an actual stand alone store, and not just an alcove in the regular price store.

Those cloths got lots of use. They went from looking spanking brand new, to looking nicely mellowed, to looking so bedraggled that my boys suggested that they needed to be demoted to the rag bag. If adolescent boys notice that a table cloth looks tired then it is clearly way past it's prime.

A few weeks ago I found the perfect replacement fabric, delightfully, I found it at Paron's half price store. It was a deep blue, waffle weave cotton. The bolt was nearly done so the cutter threw in what was left on the bolt. I had forgotten about the extra fabric and simply serged the ends. The cloth fit my dining room table perfectly. Not only that, my youngest, not Mr. Domestic by any stretch of the imagination loved the feel of the cushy waffle weave. The deep blue looked great with some of the smaller embroidered or vintage printed cloths draped over.

While I had a spiffy new cloth for my dining room. I still hadn't solved my lack of kitchen cloths. Today I checked out the sales at http://www.fabric.guru.com/. There were may lovely fabrics, but none looked right for the kitchen. I then wandered over to the clearance section of http://www.fabric.com/. Nothing there struck me as right either, but then I remembered the white and blue cotton I had bought at http://www.fabric.com/ severl summers back in the hopes of making a trench coat. I had already washed and ironed the fabric and it was on my top shelf. I pulled it down and tried it on the table. It was both too short and too wide.

With fabric, unlike with people ,who are too short and too wide, the surgery is quick and painless. I serged the hems and then covered the serged edges with black grosgrain from the bargain bin at Metro Fabrics. Kashi from Metro groaned when I pulled the roll of grosgrain out of the bin. He reminded me that I was getting a terrific price. I knew that I was. I also knew trhat I would use that ribbon a whole lot. The black grosgrain keeps the sweet blue and white floral from being too adorable. The grosgrain will also help the cloth have a longer life.

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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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