sarah in nyc

Despite the fact that  we are having a kid free week, our oldest was here for dinner three times this week. She came for Shabbat dinner so she could spend time with her cousins who were our other guests.  I had made rolled beef. There was lots left over, so our oldest came for dinner on Monday so she could enjoy more meat. Tuesday, our oldest was babysitting around the corner from our apartment.  It seemed really silly to  to all the way uptown to her apartment to eat dinner when she could eat something  home made right near her babysitting gig. I was in the mood for zucchini pancakes.  I  have mixed feelings about vegetarian food.  While a vegetarian meal can be lovely, I don’t like eating meals that feel too virtuous.  Even healthy food ought to feel delicious and not feel like you are ingesting newsprint. So I made this batch of zucchini pancakes with strained fresh shredded zucchini, soaked and shredded shitake mushrooms , ground w...

The ruffle fabric in my stash was calling to me. I knew I wanted to make a dress out of it. I knew exactly the dress I wanted to make. I wanted to make a tank dress with an arch shaped godet. Yes, you have seen me make this dress before, over and over. This ruffle fabric has so much going on you just don’t want to do a whole lot to it. It’s also a fabric of the season. By next year it will look so “Summer of 2012” that you wouldn’t want to wear it. We are going to the theatre tomorrow night, so I will wear it out then. Here is a close-up of the godet. This fabric is so easy to sew, you can understand why it is being featured so often in ready to wear. I did hem the neckline and the armscye, but I could have gotten away with raw edges. I didn’t hem the bottom, it wasn’t worth the effort. How long did making this dress take??? About 20 minutes. My cost ? about $7. I also made a quickie shrug out of some of the scraps. Making this sort of a garment is like retail therapy wit...

Mrs. Dee was my friend Meggy’s  grandmother. She lived  in the apartment house that was next door to my house. When my parents used to go out for the evening, Mrs. Dee used to babysit. she introduced us to the wonders of both Lawrence Welk and  Liberace.   Usually when Mrs. Dee would  babysit she would also bring  a bag of handwork. Most often she would make afghans, generally doing what I now know is called Tunisian stitch.   I used to hang on Mrs. Dee’s arm as she worked and asked her lots of questions about what she was doing.   The two of us really liked one another. Mrs. Dee made me this afghan for  my eighth birthday.   She made it in green, because it was my favorite color, and brown, because that was the color of my room. I actually hated ( and still hate) sea foam green, but I love that Mrs. Dee made it for me. This afghan lives on my youngest’s  bed.  It has faded some from the strong sun in my...

    I made this tallit bag as my gift to Mimi. I began with a length of pale blue silk shantung.  Mimi's family calls this Mimi blue.  It’s her favorite color.   I added the side strips that were made of out bias pieced navy blue and maroon shantung. At first this looked like an Aerogram, those one sheet air mail letters.   I added the stenciled design. I applied the color with oil paint sticks. The beading was for the fun of it.

My youngest is leaving for camp tomorrow.  As he was packing he put in an order for more boxer shorts.  I made him two pairs of these camo knit boxers. like most of the boxers I make for my son they are made out of odds and ends fabrics that have been ripening in my stash.  This particular fabric came from a Fabric Mart mystery bundle. I would not have chosen this fabric on my own. I think it’s pretty ugly.  I did make myself a pair of work out pants out of this fabric.  Since I work out at home I don’t mind wearing ugly workout pants. I always check my fabric choices with my son before making him boxers.  We both agreed that while this wouldn’t be his first choice of fabrics, it’s tolerable, especially since the sparkles on the fabric will eventually fall off in the wash.   I realized as I stacked these pairs in his room that I have made most of the boxers that he has worn for the past ten years.  That’s a whole lot of underpants!!! ...

So here it is. Complete.

    This was part of what my youngest ate for dinner last night, beef ribs left over from Friday night and non dairy cheese curls.  These non dairy cheese curls, that look just like Cheeze Doodles are put out by Kitov   a kosher packaged food producer. When I was pregnant with my youngest, and confined to bed for nearly all of that pregnancy, a friend told me about a kosher supermarket in Brooklyn that let you call in your orders on Tuesdays for Wednesday delivery. We discovered the wonders of the non dairy cheese curls from there. These non cheese curls quickly became popular in our household for their sheer perversity.  We called them Cheese Doodies.  We haven’t bought a package in years. but we found them on Sunday in the Key Foods Supermarket near my daughter’s apartment.  That Key Foods ( on 186th and Broadway) has a gigantic selection of kosher foods.   My son, like anyone who has grown up in a kosher home, knows that fake dair...

My sewing student brought me one of those adorable craft books from Japan with directions for making cute little stuffed animals. She really wanted to make one of the animals from the book. Before we started, I mentioned to my student that sometimes the directions in books are not written all that well.  So we got to work. Indeed, the directions in the book were not written well, and the project wasn’t all that well thought out. Making this monkey was just much harder then it ought to have been.  All in all, it was a pretty frustrating experience. But this was the end result.  My student designed the dress because she hated what the monkey’s legs looked like. My student came today for her last lesson before she went away for the summer.  She asked that we make something that could be completed today. I suggested a skirt.  My student was dubious that a skirt could be made in one lesson. My student went looking through my stash to choose a fabric for...

My youngest leaves for camp this week. He didn’t want any company, but he was delighted at my suggestion of beef ribs.   So it is a “ Caveman Shabbat’ around here.   But one can’t live on bones alone…   So I roasted a chicken. I put a quartered onion t=inside the chicken cavity and rubbed the chicken well with lots of smoked paprika and black pepper. I sliced up most of a head of celery and added it to the pan.  Most of the way though the cooking, I poured some lemon juice over the chicken. I plan to carve the chicken at the table. I’m serving a green salad and my usual eggplant stewed with tomato paste and hot peppers. And here is an action shot of this weeks' challah.   The action you ask???  The challah is rising.  The teeny challah is for my friend  who is ill. After it is baked I will bring it to her apartment.

This is what Eli and Rachel’s challah cover looked like before. But since then, it has undergone some changes. I outlined all of the letters with a fine tipped brush. I also hand stitched around the lettering on the border. This was a complete folly endeavored only because I liked Eli’s late mom so much. Rachel also said that she wanted “storybook lettering’ at the beginning of the text. All that’s left to do is line the piece. For those of you who were wondering, both Mimi and her mother were very happy with the tallit. We used fine wool tzitzit that had been my father's.  Mimi's maternal grandfather is a rabbi, like my late father. Mimi's mother, was brought up speaking Hebrew, as I was. I have been doling out the sets of tzitzit out of the paper sack with great care giving them to people who are just right for them.  Mimi fits that bill. Mimi kept commenting how much there is for her to look at and discover as she wears the tallit. During this week...

Mimi’s tallit has been a struggle.  Yesterday my sister asked me if  the source of my difficulties was my client. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Both my client are her family are about as wonderful as one can hope for with a client. I think that I came up with a plan that was harder to carry out than I had expected. I also made some mistakes that were just plain stupid. There were pieces of  the process that I ought to have thought through a bit better. The end result is frankly lumpier than makes me happy. Elements of this tallit though are really beautiful. This is the back view of the tallit. Night Day The atara in progress. The gazar  of the atara over the brocade. the brocade is not all that beautiful on it’s own, but I love how it shimmers through the gazar. The right side of the brocade , I know, it’s ugly. But look how terrific it looks completed with the gold shimm,ering through the dark blue. Mimi and her family show up...

A couple of weeks after my my mother in law died, I had a long phone conversation with my father- in -law.  He talked to me about how much he wanted me to have his mother –in –law’s sewing things. My mother-in-law’s mother, Tillie Green was a deeply religious woman. She used to study a Yiddish version of the weekly Torah portion each Shabbat afternoon. Tillie, was a fierce woman who was orphaned young.  Like many orphaned  Jewish girls in Eastern Europe she was married off young, while still in her teens. Tillie was unhappy in her marriage and ran off to New York. Her husband followed her.  Clever Tillie, learned enough New York  matrimonial law to have her husband caught in a room ( with her best friend), so she could be quickly divorced. She then married a widower with two boys. She raised them and her own two daughters with a kind of fierce, tough love. Tillie worked in the garment industry.  My mother- in- law used to tell me how her mother ma...

I know I haven’t been posting a whole lot about Mimi’s tallit, but that does not mean that I haven’t been working on it and more importantly, thinking about it.  The thinking time allows me to think out possible problems before they develop. I had stenciled the text for the night portion of Mimi's tallit directly onto the fabric.  That was fairly easy because I was working on a smooth expanse of fabric.  Getting the letting stenciled onto the day portion of the tallit would be a bit more complicated. The pieced silk makes the surface uneven. I realized that I had to stencil the text onto a plain surfaced silk and then applique it to the tallit. So I did just that. Mimi was very clear that she wanted the day side to look like very early morning light. Luckily I had a piece of shantung in just the right color. I used a mix of blue, iridescent white and two shades of gold to get the right shade of color. My next worry was having the texture of the piecing showing t...

Today, I went to Whole Foods. Often, they give out free samples at Whole Foods. I usually wonder about the wisdom of giving out free smaples there. Today, i had a bit of a proten drink that tasted like  liquid sawdust. I also ate some chips that tasted like wood chips.  Needless to say, I didn't buy either product. My synagogue is having it's annual meeting tonight. There is customarily a pot-luck dessert served afterwards. I made mocha kisses  with pecans and chocolate chips. Spoons used to form kisses Because dessert will be served this evening, I ate a virtuous, but delicious dinner of kale with home made cheese