The difference a bit of thread makes

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 emerald green turquoise and sapphire blue satin.The intensity of those colors next to one another blew me away. I love to recreate that intensity when I work with color. not every cliet gets into that almost scorching color combination.

I do know , that Linda who will be owning this tallit gets this color combination. Several years ago, Herta, Linda’s mom set up a kiddush table with rows of huge bowls of black and red plums, cherries and dark red grapes. The imbalanced color intensity of those many bowls of fruit was simply spectacular. looking at this tallit stripe, I realized that it echoes the colors in Herta’s bowls of fruit.

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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...

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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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