Wisdom from Reality TV

Last week was a really hard week. Each day came with terrible news. I’m fine and my kids are fine. But a relative was diagnosed with a terrible illness. A friend’s child woke up dead and a sweet young man committed suicide. It’s all a bit much to assimilate in just a few days. It does make it hard to work.

My kids have begun subscribing to Netflix. We have been enjoying an orgy of reality TV. My son now claims to be addicted to Intervention . Watching Hoarders has convinced me that we don’t need to keep quite as much stuff as we currently keep around. My husband gets very attached to objects. He also feels strongly that just a few holes or wear spots doesn’t mean that something isn’t perfectly good.

I was given a block printed table cloth several years ago. It had belonged to my friend’s mother. it’s hand printed cotton from India and was purchased from Bonwit- Teller in the mid 1960’s. I assume that when it was new it had a coarse feel. It's been washed so often that it is now as soft as gauze. The cloth has several wear holes and many stains. I cut the cloth into blocks along the large squares of the design. I discarded the damaged squares. I stacked two squares together with the right sides facing out. I serged the squares together. Then I folded the edges twice to the inside and stitched a decorative stitch in the ditch. I used an orange rayon thread, because it needed to get used up.

Now, I have three new napkins. You could say that this was a complete waste of time and effort. I don't see it quite that way. The cloth that was not so nice to use because of the holes and stains is no longer in circulation. The three napkins take up a whole lot less room than the one damaged cloth. I love the cloth and how it is just a slice of textile history. One of the hardest things for me to do are the refined bits of sewing. Practicing beautiful mitered corners means that when I need to do a lovely mitered corner on a tallit or a challah cover, I will be able to di it with ease and finesse.

I also find that these sorts of nearly mindless projects tend to prime the creative pump. I’m always grateful that I have spent time on these dumb on the face of it projects.

Here you can see the napkin lining. The napkins are so soft they would disintegrate without the lining. I realized that the folded hems will add to the longevity of the napkins.

All of my old sewing books talk about thrifty measures to remake worn our household goods so they will be useful. I see this table cloth to napkin transformation as part of that tradition of thrifty home making. We often struggle with objects that are worn, we have fondness for but can’t really use because they are damaged. I find that those damaged but beloved objects often take up an awful lot of space in my home and in my life. I’m glad that I came up with a solution that keeps the table cloth in my life but in an un-burdensome way.

So perhaps we aren’t hoarders after all.

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!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

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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