sarah in nyc

Elaine from the CMN list asked me to post a shorts tutorial, so here it is. These hot pink knit shots are my starting point for my new pair of shorts. They are a size XXL girls shorts. I use them as sleep/work out shorts. the fit is a little funny, they are a little short and the riseis also not quite long enough for my adult sized body. I’m using a length of tubular grey cotton knit from my stash.I think a fabric store owner threw it in when I bought a large amount of fabric. It has a damaged area which means that I have to be careful about how I cut out the shorts.  It’s a pretty ugly fabric with a design of perforated stars, but I’m making these shorts primarily for educational purposes. So this is how to make a pair of shorts with an existing pair as a starting point.  I have folded the shots in 1/2  and will begin by figuring out the back of the shorts. I usually don’t make a paper pattern but just cut directly into the fabric. given the cost of this fabric,( fr...

Making the red stripes for Hillary’s tallit. Stage 1 and then stage 2

This blouse began life as a high end men’s dress shirt. I bought the shirt at my favorite thrift store intending to transform it for my daughter. The shirt is made out of a smooth high quality shirting. The collar band had worn thin.   I used this thrifted  Ann Taylor  linen top as a guide for cutting and basic shape for the blouse.   I folded the  shirt in 1/2, placed the white  linen top on top of it also folded in half and then used th white top more or less as my pattern. My daughter didn’t want a strappy top so I cut accordingly.   This is the rough shape I ended up with. I cut darts, intending to make a fitted top.  I sewed up the darts , the side and shoulder seams ad had my daughter try on the roughly shaped blouse.  I had cut the darts too wide. and the blouse opened over my daughter’s belly in a really unattractive way.   I added godets to the lower edge of the blouse until  the fit flattered my dau...

Marriage must be in the air. Another request for a L’cha dodi challah cover and b’samim bag set.  I was told that the couple has traditional taste, so this is what this couple is getting. The b’samim bag is just pretty. I used the same scallop stitch in a black/gold metallic thread. It’s a sweet connection between the two pieces. The b’samim bag is backed with the same purple pieced silk that is used in the challah cover. So the two are related, like cousins or siblings, not like identical twins. Once again, I have completely confused the settings on my camera. The close up of the challah cover gives a better sense of the actual colors. There is lots of hand painting going on. I added some teeny sequins because the piece needed a bit more light. because traditional is not the same as boring.

We keep kosher. We eat well, really well, but there are some quintessential American experiences that we have not taken part in. McDonald’s food has not been part of our lives. Neither my kids , nor I have ever had a Happy Meal. McDonald’s has been in Israel for a while. Not all of the stores are kosher. When in Teveria, we passed a kosher McDonalds, but we weren’t hungry. Most of the McDonald’s we passed weren’t kosher. We were told that the airport had kosher McDonald’s. My kids and I decided to send the last of our shekels getting kosher Happy Meals. Clearly, we weren’t the only people who felt the same way. The line was long. service was slow. My kids had hands- full of agorot, left over from other trips to Israel. I’m sure the cashier was thrilled to count out the dozens of coins. I’m sure the people standing behind them on line were even more thrilled. At long last the three of us shared out two Happy Meals. My kids ( aged 15 and 22) were thrilled with their Smurf toys....

Sometimes, my work goes along swimmingly. Every seam lines up just right. Materials that are known to not play nicely together, come together  with nary a whimper. Other times,figuring out the technical elements of my work is so hard, that it just makes my head hurt. During the past couple of days I have been working on several pieces that have all made my head hurt for various reasons. I do know that if I had a more traditional sewing background I probably would not attempt to line velvet with lame'. It looks wonderful, but it is a bear to sew. Sometimes when i am trying to puzzle out a problem, I will read a book. Michael Pollan's  A Place of My Own, has ended up being a most serendipitous choice. Pollan describes the process of building a small "writing house" on his property.  Despite it's being a tiny project, Pollan hired an architect to work with him. Reading about the design process, the discussion between architect and client, was terribly...

One of our favorite websites is www.engrish.com .  It is a compilation of terrible English, mostly from what they call “The Far Yeast” , but from the rest of the world , as well. We learned about the site through my daughter’s study of Chinese. For a while we were truly obsessed with the site. We even spent lots of time speaking Engrish. If I am in a foul mood, my kids will often sit me down at the site. usually, within several minutes we are all screaming with laughter. The site has gotten us into mangled English.  Here is some that we collected on our trip to Israel. We also love how product names in other languages might not mean the same as they do in English.

During this year, my son was going through a hard period while he was in Israel. We were far away. My son needed  a safe haven to nurse is hurt feelings and to be around  people who would be kind to him  without the experience coming with an emotional price tag. My  college room mate was in Israel for the year with her family. My son chose my room mate’s home as his safe haven.  My room mate fed and fed and fed my son and made him feel that he was OK. I just mailed off this challah cover to her. The text comes from one of the Sabbath table songs and reads “ food and sustenance , to satisfy our souls”.  I had begun this challah cover several years ago . The text is painted on ultra-suede and then appliques onto heavy Italian blue silk shantung. I added the diamond stitching in gold. The border fabric is a silk, rayon, metallic Indian sari. Today I added the embellishments around the lettering. My college room mate is an excellent calligrapher.She is ...

There are some things in the world of cooking and baking that I had always assumed were just too hard to do. There are some food items that we just assume are best left to the professionals. One of them, was bagel baking. When ever you read about baking bagels there is all sorts of discussion about the right water and how hard it is to make a good bagel.  I learned that it actually isn’t all that hard to produce a credible bagel.   When we were in Israel, we spent one night at Hedva’s house. When we came into her beautiful home late in the afternoon, Hedva set us to work rolling bagels out from the dough that was prepared in a big bowl. Hedva is a big believer in the evils of white flour, so she made a whole wheat dough. We rolled out snakes of dough and formed them into bagels. Hedva boiled  the bagels to a count of ten . She ten topped the bagels with a zaatar and olive oil mix. She then baked the bagels in a hot oven. They were delicious, but not exactly bagels. ...

The dresses I had made for the trip all worked really well. They took up nearly no room in my suitcase and all washed easily and dried quickly. In addition to the dresses I had made specifically for the trip, you can see them here, http://sewnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/07/travel-wardrobe , I also took along this dress http://sewnewyork.blogspot.com/2011/07/editing-as-i-go-along.html  as well as these two dresses,

The five of us were sharing two computers, so I wasn't able to update as much as I would have liked. I'm also trying to be on the right side of the balace between keeping this blog on topic, that is sewing or cooking related, or being a bit too all over the map and self indulgent. So how about this. I will post a survey. If you want to find our more about our trip to Israel just say so.  If you prefer that I get back to sewing, let me know.

I suppose that if we were a different sort of a family, our first time all together in nearly a year would involve all sorts of adventures.We are big on small adventures. Because so many of our family vacations have come with kitchens, supermarket shopping has always oddly been a highlight of our vacations. When we have vacationed in New Hampshire ( as we did for many years) the relatively enormous size of suburban supermarkets, compared to our tiny New York supermarkets has been a sort of natural exercise in cultural anthropology.  When Kam Man, the Chinese supermarket, moved to my home town, my mother insisted on taking us on a visit. She loved showing us the display cases of pig butts and pig uteri."Isn't this great?" . It was great. Israeli supermarkets are pretty terrific. I love seeing the variety of foods on the shelves. We could have purchased a can of kosher goulash from Russia. We didn't buy the delicious looking smoked Russian mackerel. The array of kosh...

Today, we decided to visit Nazareth. This billboard was above the square just down the hill from the Basilica of the Annunciation.You can see the basilica at the top of this photo. It made me feel not very welcome in the town. I wonder what the thousands of Christian pilgrims who help enrich the coffers of the town think as they read the billboard on their way to a Christian Holy site.

We landed in Israel at about 1:00am local time. At this point our internal clocks were completely confused. We picked up our rental car and drove north to our son's kibbutz.One thing that has radically improced in israel since our last visit is the highway system. getting to the kibbutz was easy. Getting in at 4:00am was less than easy. The kibbutz has an electric gate. To get in, one calls the family you are visiting on a cell phone and then they call a code into the gate. it's a longer distance version of buzzing someone into your apartment. Unfortunately, we didn't have a cell phone.  We drove to a gas station several miles. Israel used to have a pretty terrible phone system. Cellphones have been universally adopted. We begged the gas station attendant to let us borrow his cellphone. He did and we made our call. We were let into the kibbutz, got into the house we are renting and crashed. We woke up in the early afternoon and went to visit a dear friend of my husbands ...

We left for Israel on Tuesday. Our flight included a 12 hour stop in Brussels. Our son's trip, back in October, included a similar stop. We thought that being able to explore a new city mid trip would be a blast. It was. Except that the New York-Brussels leg of the trip is packed with movies and meals which makes sleeping a bit difficult. We landed at 2:00am New York time. Taking the train from the airport to the town center was easy, and even delightful.  At one train stop, we sighted a bunny chewing on a clover along the train tracks. The scene looked like it had come out of a Durer etching. My youngest enjoying the museum... too tired in Brussels As soon as we got off the train, we walked to Grande Place. The old square was just waking up for the day and many places were still closed. Before we had left New York, we had decided that it was essential while in Brussels to eat Belgian waffles, eat chocolate, drink coffee and have Belgian beer.We found an open cafe.It se...

Soon to be reunited - photo taken by the talented ET Baros In a few hours we will be on our way to Israel to see our older son. Since I am my mother's daughter, I was up at an insanely early hour. We both get irrational travel anxiety. I got out of bed and worked out. That way I'm not so anxious that I just yell at everyone. Right now, we all all doing our usual way to deal with pre- travel anxiety, tidying up. Maybe we ought to go away more often. I guess part of or need to tidy comes from the irrational " What if we all die and people have to walk into the house and see what slobs we all are." I hope that I can post from  Eretz ha Kodesh.