sarah in nyc

The easy part is the cooking and the baking. Best wishes for a year of peace and health for all of us.

Vivian has been cleaning out her parents’ apartment.  Vivian’s mother was born in Austria and came here before the war. Vivian’s mother kept stuff. Lots of stuff.   Vivian had asked me to sort though the textiles in her mother’s collection. there were tons of table linens. There are also wonderful bits of hand work.   I almost fell over when I saw this shawl.  Vivian was ready to just give it to me. I thought it was too valuable for her to just give to me and suggested that we find an appropriate buyer.   The lining is shredding, but is easily replaced. Isn’t it spectacular???

as t As tiy have probably figured out by now, I really love food. Cooking for me, is often a form of play. I like to combine flavors and textures. I like having flavors play off of one another both in a particular dish and over the course of a meal. I know that not everyone approaches food the same way. My husband, certainly does not.  My late mother in law was not a good cook. My brother in law always says that he didn’t know food was supposed to taste good until he left home. Once, on a visit to my in laws they began to talk about the excellent crackers they had just bought at the supermarket. They went on and on about the amazing crackers they were going to serve me. I assumed that it might be something slightly out of the ordinary, something one normally might buy in a gourmet shop. What they brought to the table was a box of store brand saltines.  Which brings me in a round about way to this week’s Shabbat dinner. My daughter is away for the weekend. It’s been a ha...

I had to get some specific fabric for two tallitot I’m working on. I also needed some more grosgrain. I far prefer buying trim by the roll or the partial roll. I guess I have gotten used to buying trim from stores trying to get rid of their stock. One of my favorite places to buy trim is…I just realized that I have no idea what the name of the store is. But this is how to get there. Go to  the door of Daytona Trim on 39th street. Look across the street and up one flight. There are giant yellow signs advertising that they sell trim. I think that the address is 244 West 39th street. Daytona Trim, for those of you who haven’t shopped there is crowded and messy. It isn’t unpleasant to shop there, their staff is helpful and well informed, but the sore is far from beautiful. The upstairs and across the street store makes Daytona look like it was designed by Martha Stewart. When I walked in, the charmingly cranky owner mentioned he was closing out the far corner of the room. He told m...

My youngest claims that he is a very boring person when it comes to food. It’s true, he does not have  much of a sense of adventure when it comes to eating. He does love bread, and he loves good bread.   My family has loved the bagels that I have been making since we got home from Israel. Just to give you a sense of how much bread I have been baking, I have gone through 25 lbs of flour in the month that I have been home. I don’t eat very much bread at all.   What I have liked about the bagel baking is that unlike baking a peasant loaf or challah which require a fair amount of planning ahead, you can start a batch of bagels just a few hours before you plan to eat them. Yesterday, I was a little tired of bagels. So I decided to try my hand at pita. I had made pita once or twice several years ago. I remembered that it was a soft dough and had a bit of oil in it. I mixed up the dough and it had doubled in about 90 minutes. I rolled out loaves pulled from palm sixe...

I think the moment has come back for each of these dresses all in multi size 8-10-12. I could see myself wearing any of them.   Several months ago I went to the museum at FIT with my friend Carol.  There was an exhibit of fashion from Japan. The Miyake dresses from the early ‘80s and even some of the less extreme dresses of that ilk  looked really wonderful again. I could see the turtleneck dress being made up in a textured black fabric and pulling off that cool monastic vibe. The wrap front dresses look good on everyone. The sweatshirt-ey dresses just need a couple of well placed darts. So,  if I like them so much why aren’t I keeping them??? Because I don’t use patterns when I make garments.   So if these appeal to you. Shoot me an email at sj.hand@verizon.net . Let me know that it is give away #3. Again I will cover postage for US mail. Over seas folks need to cover the cost of postage  

By Ivalyn T. Jones who some of you know from the  CMN list. Ivalyn is often a source of terrific sewing wisdom, but I just love the sound of her name.  I keep thinking that her name sounds like she's Philip Marlow's colleague and rival. The package is now in the hands of the USPS and should be at Ivalyn's door in the next couple of days. Many thanks to my daughter who walked to the post office in the rain to ship it off. ( My daughter did feel that it was a fair trade for my ironing her clothes.) The little wire thread guide  for my serger, arrived from Sears yesterday, packaged in a large box. I carefully attempted to attach the thread guide when it popped off the serger and onto my sewing room floor. ( The fate of the original thread guide). Much cursing accompanied  my frantic search on the floor on my hands and knees. I found a wire thread guide, although I can't tell you if it was the new one or the old one. After two or th...

The two dresses on the left are size 8. The two patterns on the right are multi- sized  6-8-10. The Evan Picone dress would be wearable minus the silly ruffles and with a good wide leather belt worn at the waist. The puffy sleeved dress  looks good again. The skirts and pants pattern is a classic.  The Chetta B outfit??? OK, I can’t think of anything nice to say. It needs significant re-working to be worn today. But it would be wonderful if you were staging a play set in the 1980’s. As before, this is a give-away for the early bird. Send me an email and it’s yours. ( sj.hand@verizon.net ). US addresses get free shipping, overseas folks need to pony up for postage. There will be at least two more pattern packages offered this week. I also gave a giant bag of fabric scraps to my kids' old elementary school today. It feels great to purge the extras out of my life.

    I know that this tallit looks simple. Actually, that was a design  goal. But creating this tallit has been anything  but simple. No, it wasn’t client troubles. Hilary has been delightful.   Mostly this tallit has involved several technical challenges.  The black and white stripes are from a tallit that is over a century old. Hilary washed it. I pressed mended and interfaced the tallit. I hope that the glue on the interfacing helps keep the fibers together for a long time.   The red silk comes from a silk scarf that had belonged to Hilary’s mother. The red scarf had been painted with vaguely calligraphic Asian looking flourishes. The strident red needed to be toned down a bit to work with the rest of the tallit. I had suggested using Chinese border designs. Hilary had suggested that I use the initial letters of the people who are remember in this tallit. Initially, I didn’t like Hilary’s idea at all.  I played with some letter...

I was just given a batch of vintage patterns from the late 1980’s- early 90’s. Over the next several days I will be giving them away in batches organized by size. While at first glance, the styling on the pattern envelope may be dated, the garments can all be sewn to look of the moment. The sundress is particularly adorable. pencil skirts are always good to have in a wardrobe. This current batch of patters, is multi sized in sized  12-14-16. Some have been used, other not. If you want to be part of this give away, send  your name and address to my email, sj.hand@verizon.net . This is a first come first serve kind of a deal. If you live in the US, then I will be happy to spring for the postage. If you live overseas, then I ask that you cover the cost of the postage.

  OK, before I write this, I need to state that I am a feet on the ground kind of a girl.  Some people are into spirits and crystals. I’m a cynic and a skeptic. be that as it may, my building has ghosts.   I am not a particularly tidy person. I don’t know if you can hear my husband laughing because of the understatement there.  I’m not at al tidyu. So if things go missing, I would assume that it’s because  I’m such a slob.   My former neighbor from across the hall, Andrea runs a house that looks like it could be photographed for a shelter magazine.  Several years after Andrea moved in, she mentioned that there seemed to be ghosts in her apartment who were moving things around. Items that had been left out on a table would be  found a week or two later inside of a trunk  inside of a closet.   There were other oddball incidents  that kept taking place both in Andrea’s apartment and in mine. Mostly it was a matter of th...

 I was edging the atara for Hillary's tallit. Things were all going along swimmingly, and then the thread guide  for the upper looper of my serger just popped of and disappeared. I crawled around on the floor of my work space looking for the teeny thing and that looper is just plain gone. I tried to use the serger without the thread guide. Well, it won't work without it. My serger is a Kenmore. The nice customer service people talked me through navigating their parts site. I found the part. As one would expect from a piece that is essentially a twisty piece of wire, it wasn't expensive. shipping though, costs several times the cost of the part. They had me over a barrel. I just had to pay the crazy shipping costs. Later in the day I went out to do some errends. While I was out, my keys fell out of my backpack. I retraced my steps and went back to each of the places  I had gone. The keys are gone. I had customer reward cards on...

Yesterday, my husband and I had a Shiva call to pay on the Upper East Side. It was a nice day, so we decided to walk. We had listened to the reading of the names at the memorial ceremony on the radio as we went about our Sunday morning. I realized as we were walking that I was walking exactly the same route I had walked ten years before. As soon as the second tower came down, I realized that my youngest starting his first full day at a Jewish Day School housed in a famous synagogue on the Upper East Side was in danger of being the next target. I rushed out of the house ready to catch the cross town bus. When I got to the bus stop a dispatcher informed me that the buses were no longer running and Central Park was closed to all civilian vehicles. I began to walk east.  When I reached Columbus Avenue, a downtown avenue,  there were streams of emergency vehiacles going downtown. I was especially struck by the hand drawn signs behind the windshields of...

I’m trying to mentally work out the kinks on a piece. I flex my  sewing muscles by working on a garment. On our way home from Israel, we had a long wait at Ben Grurion. There were two  Michal Negrin  boutiques there.  http://www.michalnegrin.com/category-12-Fashion You can see her work on her website. I was fascinated at how a really simple dress or top looked really complicated just because of the print used on the garment. The Negrin garments are all made out of synthetic knits. I had some sheer knit in various colors. I decided to layer a burnt orange knit under a dark brown. I like how the two layers of color interact. I lay a length of lace over the brown layer. I decided to go with a cheesy technique, I spray pained over the lace with gold metallic spray paint.  I let it dry ad sewed the two layers together. So here it is. The dress, remarkably does not smell of spray paint. I also realized that my rendition is not nearly as cutise as Michal Ne...

I had made Linda this tallit for her ordination from Rabbinical school.I decided to make her a tallit bag as a gift.   This is what I ended up making. The construction was actually fairly simple. I fused each element to fuse-able fleece and then stitched it down. Most of the seams are covered with black grosgrain ribbon. I use the diamond stitch on the machine to sew down the ribbon. The dark metallic thread is actually not meant to be used in a sewing machine. It is meant to be knit with a knitting machine. It’s actually fairly fragile.  I love that my sewing machine handles this thread with grace.   The gold leaves were stamped on to the turquoise silk noil. The watery waves are left over from the wedding tallit.   Not every project needs to be drama filled to come out well.

Sometimes, I have free reign to make what ever I want.  Sometimes I have to tailor what I make exactly to my clients needs and taste. I had made Rebekah’s tallit maybe 15 years ago. She is a person of quiet taste. Recently, Rebekah got married. This is the challah platter that she uses each week.   The challah cover needed to work with the platter. This is what I came up with.     I’m pretending that this is TV and am doing a slow reveal.

I take part in a few different sewing forums and discussions on the internet. It’s a nice way to discuss issues that may not be burning topics for the people I interact with in real life. My sewing buddies on the net are just the people to discuss the various attributes of various kind of interfacings or various ways to insert a zipper of fabric sources. In a discussion of various fabrics we had all purchased in www.fabricmartfabrics.com mystery bundles, one person mentioned that she had purchased an orange printed cotton that she found hideous. She posted a photo of the said fabric. I loved it. I proposed a trade with fabric  from a mystery bundle that didn’t suit me. The woman who hated this fabric had the gentle coloring that blonds often have. For her, the orange was quite hideous. It works with my coloring. I did have a pale greenish taupe sweater knit in my stash that made me tired just looking at it. We agreed to a trade. she made a terrific hooded sweater out of the sw...