A Little Time Out for Home Improvement

Sun and natural fibers are not friends. Usually that isn't a problem with clothing. But when you are dealing with curtains that hang in a sunny window, you basically have three choices. You can put up synthetics, or you can put up many layered draperies that take a long time to develop sun rot, or you can replace your curtains fairly often.

My bedroom is one of the two rooms in my apartment that actually gets sunlight. I have gone the, replace often, route with the bedroom curtains. The last pair were blue chambray ones from Target. They lasted surprisingly well.

As the house will be filled with company for Thanksgiving, some of the many flaws the the apartment are becoming unbearable. We have been doing some clutter purging and organizing. I also noticed that the bedroom curtains have fallen prey to sun-rot. It was time to replace them

I stopped by Target yesterday, and hated all of the curtains they were selling. Friday, a box had arrived from http://www.fabric.com/. I had purchased two fabric to be table cloths. One was adorable. The other looked great on my computer screen, but was kind of horrifying close up. I was thinking of giving it away. But then, thinking it over a bit, I realized that it would be fine as a curtain for the bedroom. You don't have to have your face as close up to a curtain as you do to a table cloth. It's isn't exactly my first choice, but it will do until it rots away.

Had I planned to make curtains with the fabric, I would have purchased twice as much so there would be a little gathering action.The gathering would have minimized the effect of the print some. So, it's more in your face than I prefer in a bedroom. I am please by how well the pattern matches up.

New curtains with afternoon sun streaming through. I bound the edges with black twill tape

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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!!!

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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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