sarah in nyc

that I designed. The bar-mitzvah is the Shabbat in which we read about the red heifer. The bar- mitzvah boy's parents wanted the cow to have a primitive look. I gave  the cow the bemused look. After all, who wants to be pulverized???? I was not at all involved with the printing and love the choice they made to work with both red and black ink. The invitation came in a red envelope. I smudged out the bar mitzvah boy's last name in English. The family regreted that I didn't sign my work, but I usually don't. If you get this invitation, now you know that  I designed it. This is my second invitation for this family. I love working with them. They are creative and exacting, and push me to do my best work.

Tonight’s guests are vegetarian, so I decided to make home made noodles for them.  I had been thinking that I wanted a thin rolling pin for noodle making. Yesterday, I visited the Museum of Art and design with my son and walked home from Columbus Circle.  The two and a half mile route is punctuated with house wares stores. I stopped in at most of them seeking the perfect rolling pin.   Most of what I found wasn’t quite right. As I approached  95th street, I  realized that what I really wanted was a dowel, cut to size to use as a rolling pin.  Luckily, I was approaching one of my favorite neighborhood stores, Grand Metro Hardware. Grand Metro isn’t a particularly large store, but it carries an astonishingly large array of goods from standard hardware , like screws and bolts and paint, to housewares, picture frames, appliances and lumber and plumbing supplies.   I also love going I to grad metro because I often use hardware goods in...

Some foods needs lots of fussing to be tasty. This is not the case for one of the most delicious vegetables in the world, crispy kale. Until today, I have made crispy kale by washing and then carefully drying kale and then massaging it with olive oil and adding a sprinkle of salt and then baking it on a high heat. Yesterday, on WNYC I heard an even easier method of making crispy kale. You just cook it , in a dry pan, in the oven. Yes, it takes a while, you need to open the oven every once in a while to pull out the crispy leaves, put them in a bowl  and re arrange what is left in the pan and continue cooking until it is all crispy. The only problem is that it is hard not to grab leaves out of the bowl and eat them  as I walk into the kitchen.I will see if any are left for dinner. I used a mix of three varieties of kale. The bowl, a gift from my sister.

One of my favorite things to do to make lettering stand out is to stitch a line of metallic thread around  each letter. it’s pretty subtle. I like to use small stitches because the top most point of the stitch catches the light the most. If there are more smaller stitches, the light get caught more.   Here you see lettering, some with stitching, and some without.   This is part of a larger photo transfer challa cover. more images in a couple of days.

As a family, we don't take Valentine's Day terribly seriously.It isn't exactly a Jewish holiday. We do tend to deal with it in a low key jokey way. Tonight I have made a nice dinner, and I even made dessert. I made these meringues more or less out of  Leah Leonard's Jewish Cookery. I added shaved chocolate to her basic recipe. You see them arranged on a silver plate footed dish that came from my husbad's family. The pretty napkin is from Vivian. Meringues pre heat oven to 250 2 egg whites beat in large bowl until foamy add a few grains salt keep beating until stiff but not dry in a different bowl combine   1 1/2 C sugar and  1/8 tsp cream of tartar add sugar mixture to eggwhites by teaspoonfull add a tsp vanilla and keep beating until white hold a peak add shaved chocolate put a sheet of parchment paper on a baking sheet using two teaspoons, place spoons full of meringue on baking sheet bake 40 minutes or until crispy and done let your son eat the left ...

One of the cool tools that comes along with running a blog with Blogger is a nifty tool called, "Stats".  In addition to the counter at the top of the page, I can see how many people each day or week are looking at which post. It is always interesting for me to see what people are reading. Sometimes, if I have posted about a related issue on on of the sewing discussion groups that I participate in, I understand about the surge of interest in an older posting. Often, it is just a complete surprise to see what people are reading on a particular day. I can also see which counties are generating readers. Not surprisingly, most of my readers are from the U.S. Some of my sewing buddies live in other countries, so when i see that I have readers in England, or New Zealand or Australia, or Canada , I have a pretty good idea of who that reader might be. It feels a little like one of those old fashioned visiting cards left on a silver tray by my front door. There ...

Living in a city that is proud of having the best and the most wondeful is a bit of a double edged sword. Broadway is here so were have tons of top notch theatre. Carnegie Hall is here, so we hear the very best of classical music. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is just across town and it holds the best of in the world of art. The negative side of all of the best and the most wonderful is that often there isn't room for the good and the quirky. This city can be a difficult one for the emerging artist. Other cities often take their own creative artistic output a little less seriously so there is room for the artistic to develop and emerge. Radio in Boston is way more delightful  than the not very exciting radio scene here in New York. The Brooklyn Museum is an easy subway ride away from my house. I went yesterday with a friend who was doing a staycation.The fact that the museum isn't in Manhattan means that it is free to not take it self all that seriously. The staff is...

 Sew up the sleeve seams. Be sure that you have sewn up the side seams of your shirt. Turn the sleeves inside out so you can drop them into the armscye. Be sure to nip the center top of the sleeve o you can match that to the shoulder seam. You will also  match up the two under arm seams. Sew slowly, and the curves that look like they are not matching up will. Here is the completed shirt on my dummy. I know the sleeves look oddly skinny here but they really do fit.

I had always assumed that drafting a set in sleeve was way too difficult for me. That's the reason that most of the garments I have made are sleeveless.  A while back, I decided to see if I could figure out how to draft a sleeve without a pattern. The following is what I have figured out. This method will work for a knit fabric. I have also used this method on not very fitted sleeves made out of a woven fabric.  I am assuming that you have already made a basic tank bodice and have sewn the shoulder seams together. I made lace sleeves, so you can see the contrast between the bodice and the sleeves.

Another treasure from Vivian VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL This table cloth was part of Vivian’s mother’s trousseau. I  believe that it may have been hand woven or woven on a barely industrial loom. You can see that Vivian’s grandmother’s monogram was embroidered on  the cloth. I saw the same monogram embroidered on her embroidered batiste night gowns as well. The cloth is wonderful but it was heavily stained when I got it. I soaked it in Borax and that helped quite a bit. Despite the Borax, there were still several large brown stains on the white parts of the cloth. Today, I took the radical step of sponging the stains with a diluted bleach solution and then washing away the bleach. Then I washed the entire cloth in the machine with no detergent. It seem to have worked. This cloth will look wonderful with both my grey meat dishes as well as with my white dairy dishes. I might need to make red napkins. I feel like a domestic goddess.

A few months ago I was shopping in the garment district with some of my sewing buddies we were in one of the hole in the wall stores on 38th Street .As often is the case, there was a box of remnants near the cash register. one of the remnants was a three yard length of a dirty textured white cotton /synthetic blend. I bought the piece for maybe $5. I took it home and washed it and it came out fine. I really liked the puckery knit.   I thought I would make a 3/4 sleeved scoop neck t- shirt. I had made one out of a different bargain white lacey knit a while back , but I had made it too short. That shirt was my first successful attempt at a set in sleeve. I was immensely proud of that sleeve but the short length made that shirt not all that wearable.  The puckeryfabric has been sitting in a pile in my sewing space waiting to be made up.   My husband has been working nearly every waking hour for the past few months. I wandered into our bedroom at 11 last night to retr...

Our friend, scholar, Art Green, is scholar in residence at our synagogue this weekend. Tomorrow he is speaking after a pot-luck lunch. I am bringing this wild rice dish. I was thinking about “Diet for a Small Planet” as I was planning it. The dish began with onions sautéed in olive oil until they were browned. I then added the white and wild rice to the pot and toasted them while the water was put put to boil.  I added the water after it had boiled. While the rice was cooking I shredded up a bunch of collard greens and added those to the pot. I also toasted some walnuts and some sunflower seeds and set them aside. When the rice was nearly done, I threw a few hands full of dried cranberries to the pot. I called y mother and my sister ad by then the rice was done, but too soupy.  I poured off the excess liquid into a sauté pa, added some rum ( I didn’t have an open bottle of wine hanging around, and the rest of the open bottles were too fancy to use in cooking. I didn’t wan...

 Apron illistrations from Smart Sewing- 1949  My own take on the domestic goddess uniform-My apron is knee length on me. Sometimes it seems as if you can’t have a sewing blog without featuring aprons.  My mother never, ever wore an apron. My father though, used to wear a big denim, butcher’s apron when he baked bread. For lots of the women about half a generation younger than I am who are sewing and blogging about it, aprons seem to evoke a sort of “days of yore domesticity”. lots of these blogging young women have taken on apron wearing in a tongue in cheek sort of a way. A few years back I had made myself a butcher’s apron that didn’t quite work. but I wore it when I baked bread. One of my sisters had given me the 1949 edition of “Smart Sewing” an annual magazine with nifty sewing projects. I fell in love with the darted aprons made out of a bias square of fabric and finished off with a big ruffle. I wanted an apron that would provide more coverage for bread ...