Completed baby gifts..and Food friday

I completed both baby jackets. This one is going to the more local baby. I’m impressed that I managed to install a zipper and have everything end up even. One of the downsides of being self taught is that some basic home-ec type skills have been learned with massive degrees of difficulty. I cut down a longer separating zipper.

This is jacket for my new cousin in Israel.

The buttons are from my stash. The elastic is from a large roll I had gotten at the Boston Children’s Museum nearly twenty years ago. Maybe it wasn’t such a good purchase. I think this is the third time I have used any of the elastic from this large spool.

Both jackets are lines in a striped shirting . Fabric Mart's label says the fabric is from Ann Taylor. Regardless of the provenance, it has a really nice smooth feel. Just right for smooth baby skin.

I used this magazine

To figure out how to plot the dress for Shira, my Israeli cousin’s older sister. No, I can’t read Japanese but the directions are so good, and so pictorial that you can figure things out pretty well, even without being able to read the language. I found an online centimeter translator to help me with translating centimeters into inches.

You can see how I plotted the measurements for Shira’s dress in chalk on the reverse of the fabric. Clearly I didn’t slavishly copy every design line. I thought the dress was too skimpy looking, and added a wider hem-sweep. I played with the neckline a bit.

Here is the jumper completed;

But it was Friday. Yes, I cooked. I made beef, with a coffee ground and mixed spice rub,

and spicy eggplant

I still have to make the kale salad, but our table is set with my new cloth made out of IKEA fabric.

I know, it’s kind of a silly cloth. It reminds me of visiting academic homes during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The challah is warming up in the oven and will appear on the table just before we sit down to eat.

Shabbat Shalom!!

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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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