A day of this and that

Sunday, I began working with a new sewing student. I taught her how to run my sewing machine. She made a Barbie pillow/bean bag and a sleeping bag for Barbie. My student has a little sister. you can see the sleeping bag and pillow rolled up together ready for Barbie's adventures. Yes, you are seeing beautiful top-stitching. I know top stitching is not part of a usual first sewing lesson, but my student seemed up to the task. She has good hands. I’m excited to see what she will be making.

I don’t think my student had realized that if she wanted to she could learn how to make clothing. Once she realized that she seemed REALLY excited. next week we will make a Mother’s Day gift for her mom. I’m not telling what we are making, in case Mom is a reader.

I finished a gift for a friend. it’s a scarf I had dyed a long time ago. I used lace as a stencil and spray painted. it’s a lot of look for not a whole lot of work.

Lately, I have been understanding why ladies of yore used to employ laundresses. I’m still working on getting all of the linens we used during Passover washed, dried and ironed. The Seder table cloth is still in the middle of being darned. I ought not have used the passive voice there. I’m doing the darning.

We switch all of the pretty decorative lines we have around the house just before Passover. I figured that I own so many cloth doilies that I might as well use them to line the dessert platters rather than using paper.

So now I’m ironing.

And ironing. Today I ironed a stack of assorted napkins including cut work from the 1950’s, wonderful hemstitched linen, linen damask , greenish 1940’s linen /rayon damask and 1940’s starburst damask in lavender/white. I have a few more table cloths to do.

Spray starch is my new best friend.

My mother did ton’s of ironing. I remember her ironing my twill play shorts when I was a little girl. All of my father’s shirts, handkerchiefs and our dresses and blouses all got ironed by my mother.

My mother used to send out the fancy table cloths to get done. The weekday ones were heavy homespun and didn’t need to be pressed. There was a basket that was always full of ironing that needed to get done. it was never empty. I don’t know if either of my sisters iron. I know that I do lots of it each week.

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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!!!

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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