Skip to main content

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.

100_2884

100_2885

This is jacket for my new cousin in Israel.

babyjacket stencil 1

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

100_2877

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.

100_2876

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;

shira's dress

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

beep (2)

and spicy eggplant

spicy eggplant

 

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

ikea cloth

 

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!!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...