sarah in nyc

S and I met at a family celebration when we were both in elementary school. For a few years we were pen pals but we had lost touch. The Rosh Ha Shanah right after 9/11 we accidentally found ourselves sitting next to each other in synagogue. We were delighted to find one another again. S is getting married later on in the spring. She found a wonderful dress  and I’m making the sash to go with. The ribbon is grosgrain. the rhinestones are vintage WWII era rhinestones from Czechoslovakia. I found them at Margola on 37th street. Margola is moving to Englewood , N.J. at the end of the month. In searching the district for these rhinestones I have looked at lots of them. None had as much sparkle as these vintage crystals. I'm having fun figuring out the placement of the stones and stitching them to the ribbon with gold thread.

Shaun, my client for this tallit loves color. I have posted the progress of the color red in the base of this tallit. Shaun was happy with the photos I had emailed to her.  Shaun particularly  loves when similar colors bump up one against the other. Back in the days when I used to make quilts, I used to pull fabric bolts off the shelf in the fabric store, stack them on the cutting table, and play with color combinations until the colors vibrated in my eyes. The quilts I made in those days were pretty wild. Yesterday, I bought the embroidery threads that I will use to cover all of the seams on this tallit. I purchased the ribbons on line. I love the red paisley, and and not quite sure about the multicolored watercolor print. pictured as well, is the red shantung stripe with lettering. There will be other stripes in purple. I see a whole lot of color vibration going on…how about you???

The local Salvation Army was having a half-price sale. ( Hurray!!!)  I picked up several cashmere sweaters. None cost more than $6. My husband got an orange v-necked sweater that was too big for him, so I serged it down to his size. The sweater looked awful on him until it was altered. Now it looks pretty spiffy. I loved the color of this periwinkle blue cashmere turtleneck. I don't wear turtlenecks all that often, because like most New York apartments, my apartment is often over heated. If I were living back in Boston, I would be wearing turtlenecks all the time. I knew I would be cutting the sweater open to make a cardigan. I just wasn't sure how I would edge it. I went with a fold over elastic. For those of you who don't sew, that's the satiny elastic that often is used to edge polar-fleece. I'm not sure if I love the edging. It will do for now. If I come up with a more clever idea I will replace the elastic with something cuter. I have reached the point w...

It’s been a hard and snowy winter. The temperature has been bouncing all over the thermometer. Today was a high point on the temperature bouncing.  it hit the mid 1970’s. While I was out shopping for Shabbat dinner, the sun was out, it was warm and not at all muggy. The few times we experience such perfect weather, I always wonder how many days of such weather we would need annually here in New York before we became as mellow as Californians. Both the balmy weather and last night’s dinner made me want to serve food that was light and springy. My youngest turned 15 yesterday. he requested that we take him to Deli Casba, a local kosher grill. My son and his best friend each ordered a platter  of ribs. My husband and I each ordered a burger. I guess we are both used to lower fat food but we both felt awful after our meals.   So tonight ( aside from challa) I’m service a first course of mezze, including the marinated cucumber/carrot salad pictured above, store bought...

Now I’m working on constructing the other stripes for Linda’s tallit. The top photo shows the stripe unit before I added the decorative stitching, the lower photo with the stitching. It just looks better with the stitching. as I add the decorative stitching two thoughts keep going through my head. the first is the Bauhaus dictum of “Form follows function”.  The decorative stitching looks cute, but more importantly strengthens a potentially weak place in the tallit. Shantung shreds like crazy. By reinforcing the back of the stripe with iron on interfacing and then stitching over the seam allowances with dense decorative stitching will keep the silk from failure for a long , long time. The other  thought that keeps running through my head as I look at the intense red, purple and orange is how much those rich almost identical colors remind me of my favorite Barbie dress from when I was a little girl. My friend Paula owned the dress. it was a strapless evening gown made in eme...

This is my sewing machine. It's a Janome 11590. You can buy it for about $150. It's a great machine. I chose a soft focus image because it conveys a bit of how much I love this machine.  I had bought it in a moment of desparation when my usual machine seems to have died. I bought this machine as a stop gap measure until I got my other machine fixed. I would have been satisfied with a machine that was just  not terrible. This machine is so terrific that I still haven't repaired the old machine. I feel especially fond of the machine when I do long lines of decorative stitching. The purple silk diamond stitching above steetches across about 45 inches of tallit stripe. I did four, 45 inch rows of that stitch with silk thread. The machine never balked. The thread never broke. My old machine had to be coaxed and coddled to produce long rows of  decorative stitching.  I never have to worry with this machine. Sometimes you need to spend big bucks to...

His jeans were full of holes. Yesterday, I even found him jeans that fit him ( the only two pairs in H+M in his size). After my son tried on the new pants he complained about how stiff they were. I guess new jeans are not part of his sensory memory bank. This morning I darned the holes in his old jeans. One of our pillowcases got a giant rip while in the wash. I serged up the seam and then noticed that the edge was beginning to fray. I sewed a ribbon to the edge and then folded over the ratty edge and did a zig zag stitch over the fold. I realized as I was working that most standard pillowcase embellishment was probably a solution to a similar issue of wear.

Like many of my fellow 1960’s born children, one of my earliest cooking experiences was making a box of pudding from a box while my mother made the rest of dinner. I would pour the powdered milk and milk into a pot and stir until the mixture came to a boil.  One of my first cooking from scratch experiences was making pudding from scratch. I was was a college student , working in the campus  day care center. It was a really snowy winter. the kids were stuck in doors for weeks on end.   We were all doing our best to keep the kids amused despite being indoors. I came up with the idea of finger painting with pudding. I made a delicious burnt sugar pudding that we dyed with food coloring   . The kids then finger painted with the pudding and made prints of their hand work onto  coated paper. they talked about that activity for months.   At this point in my life, I have made pudding so often, I make it with out a recipe .I am a big believer that aft...

Dingles One of the nice things about working at home, as opposed to working in a self contained studio is that there is a constant parade of people wandering in and out of my apartment , who will offer feedback on my work.  Sometimes they will catch a typo (always appreciated) Other times, a passing comment may have me re- think a problem I am having with a piece. Clients will often see work in progress and it will often inform their own choices in their own commissions. Challa cover, ready to be packaged I had thought that this challa cover was done. My husband took a close look and asked, “ No dingles???” Dingles are what we call the beaded tassels I often add to the corners of my challa covers. I don’t like disappointing my husband, so I added the dingles. Each corner is slightly different. The dingles add a certain extra measure of delight to an already lively challa cover. Just in case the photos, and the painted silk and the embroidered binding were not enough to de...

Another layer of color  brings Shaun’s tallit closer to the red that I’m aiming for. The colors I’m adding to the dye mix are brown, a crazy bright red and purple.   Another layer or two of color should do it.

Here it is, right out of my oven. Ready for my kids to devour. They don’t all look so picture perfect, but this loaf is particularly cute.

Often, I will describe myself as a schmatta girl. Occasionally, I will have a client that is also a schmatta girl (or boy). Shaun is is a schmatta girl. Fabric has meaning and tells a story. Shaun loves to layer shades of red. Her tallit will have reddish stripes with text calligraphed onto them. The base of the tallit is a silk/hemp blend. The fabric has a vintage feel, like a fancy dress from the late 1940’s with a cottony wrong side and a smooth satiny face. I could imagine a dinner dress made in this fabric. Yesterday, I lay down the first layer of dye. I plan to layer several layers of thin dye to get a deep maroony red. because the dye will be applied unevenly the finished fabric will have an iridescent look. I know, so far this looks pink. Give me a few more passes with the dyes and it will be a rich off-red. I plan to keep deepening the color until I’m happy with the results.

 Mount Taboule  Our oldest comes home for spring break today. Like any good mom, I’m making some of her favorites. Tonight’s meal is complicated by the fact that one of our guests detests onions. My daughter loves taboule.  Despite it’s being fairly easy to make, I generally buy it ready made.  This time though, I bought two large bunches of parsley and one of mint and ran them through the food processor. I let the taboule soak up boiling water while I taught this morning. After the lesson I combines the fragrant herbs, the soaked bulgher wheat olive oil lemon juice and salt. this will be part of our first course, along with hummus, marinated artichokes and carrot sticks.  home made noodles with lots of poppyseeds and black pepper  Now that I have the perfect noodle rolling pin, noodle making is much, much easier. We are eating a meat meal so these noodles are being served with chicken broth, poppy seeds and lots of black pepper. I was able to taste test the...

Photo Challa Cover VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL   The recipient of this Challa cover said that she loves natural colors like purple and green. The silks were in my stash. painting the silk with the tendrils feels as satisfying as doodling in the margins of my notebooks did in High School. The outer border is printed with a commercial stamp . Printing with a color so close to the silk’s blue gives a brocade lik...

My mother used to describe house work she hated to do in toilet cleaning units. So cleaning the oven,  in pre self cleaning oven days, was equivalent to cleaning ten toilets.  Washing the living room windows was five toilets. I still think of some jobs in terms of their toilet value. A few years back I was asked to make fundraising calls  for my son’s school by a professional fundraiser. I told her that I would happily clean all of the school’s toilets instead. No, I didn’t have to clean the school’s toilets, but i also didn't have to make the phone calls. Un-sewing, or undoing sewing is a job I hate. The only thing worse than undoing regular machine sewing is un-sewing a serged seam. In my impatience in sewing the borders on the photo challa cover I serged the borders on crooked. definitely a three toilet kind of a job. I procrastinated. I couldn’t put it off any longer and pulled out my favorite seam ripper, an X-acto knife. It was slow going . So, I pulled out a r...