Feeling Sewing Machine Love

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 get a great machine. But not always.

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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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מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

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sarah in nyc

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