sarah in nyc

Last night I felt hugely grateful to be living right where I am.  We don’t have river views. Riverside Park  is a steep walk down hill.  Our building was built 100 years ago when buildings were built to last. The winds were ferocious last night.  The lights occasionally flickered and the building shuddered once or twice. We have power. We have lights and we have internet and we have lots of food in the house.   Our friends who live downtown are not as lucky. People who live in low lying areas of the city have really suffered.   I took a little walk today. Our building suffered just a bit of damage. A small bit of facing on the side of the cornice was sheared off by the wind. This tree in our back courtyard was uprooted. Luckily, all it damaged was a fence. It could just as easily have broken windows and hurt  some of our neighbors.   The building across the street lost a large piece of it’s cornice. Apparently, last night it w...

This fall I have been making good use of our slow cooker. I have been making lots of what I call “Poor People Soup”.  Basically it is a collection of meat bones , onions, carrots, parsnips and and perhaps cabbage or a can of crushed tomatoes. I put a collection of whole spices in a tea ball and let it all cook away. I have discovered that if you let the soup simmer away for two days the vegetables caramelize. The flavor becomes deep.  I started the soup last night before I went to bed. This morning I added two pieces of chicken to the soup. I suppose if I were more refined I would strain all of the vegetables out of the soup. Tonight’s company are people were are really comfortable with, so I am going to serve the soup in it’s unrefined version. Chicken is cooking away in the oven  made with lemons, basil black pepper and rosemary. I also have rice and hard wheat cooking away at the same time. I need to figure out a vegetable and dessert. Yesterday was a big baki...

required more basting than I have ever done in my life.  because I had embroidered the lettering on the same side as the embroidered letters, I had to flip the middle of the chuppah over. That’s easy to say, but much more complicated to do.   First I tea dyed one of the lovely tablecloths that came to me by way of Vivian.  I made some really strong tea, added it to hot water and then let the table cloth sit in the tea for about 20 minutes. I dried the cloth in the dryer.   The color was perfect. Here you see the cloth  that Danielle's great, great aunt embroidered over the tea dyed cloth from Vivian's grandmother.   After basting the two cloths together, I cut out the center of the cloth and sewed all of the raw edges. then I flipped the sandwiched cloths, hand basted two two together and then inset pieced from the tea-dyed cloth where things didn’t quite line up. I machine stitched all of the raw seams with a three stepped zig-zag.  Ye...

Last week my student and I met. She made this jacket. It’s  made out of a lovely wool that arrived in a Fabric Mart Mystery Bundle .   There is a cute collar on the jacket that we drafted together. Attaching the collar left a raw edge on the inside of the jacket. My student had run out of sewing steam. When I suggested covering the raw edge with ribbon that attached to the jacket with iron on mending tape…my student loved the idea. It worked. Unfortunately, I had left a bit of the iron on mending tape on my ironing board.  I pressed the jacket and fused the mending tape to the lower center of the back.  I got most of it up, but the jacket has an ugly blog on the back, and it was my fault. I felt terrible. My student felt awful, and probably really angry and me as well, but she was too polite to yell at me. This is the blob. The fuseable blob is 6 inches up from the ham and is just about in the middle of the back of the jacket.  During the wee...

Last Friday afternoon our phone and internet service died.  I am also probably the last adult in Manhattan who does not own a cell phone. Being disconnected was an odd experience. Despite, or perhaps because of  being disconnected I did a great deal of work. My boys went to New York Comicon.   My older son dressed up as Dr. Zoidberg from Futureama. Typically, my older son is minimalist in his approach to costumes. The coat is mine. The boxing gloves are his. he did purchase both the nose- glove and the red swim cap. I sewed yarn to the glove to make it wearable as a nose.   My younger son took a more complex approach. His costume was a joint effort. My younger son decided to dress like King of all Cosmos, a character on a Japanese video game.   I made the jacket, the sash and the collar. My son engineered and painted the headpiece.   His lovely work proves that his claim that he is not good with his hands  is not...

I was asked to write up a tutorial for a shrug. It took much longer to write this than to make the shrug. The hardest part of  doing this was taking the terrible pictures of me in the shrug.  I found the directions for this shrug a few years ago in  this book  . 1 – Fold a piece of fabric in 1/4. This lace  reached from wrist to wrist ( about 50 inches and was about 40 inches long. 2- Cut an easy curve from  the fold to the wrist…if you are making your shrug out of a non stretchy woven make it much larger than you think you need it to be. A stretch fabric does not need to be cut so generously. 3-  I have opened the shrug. sew where the pink lines are. If you think it looks like a dolman sleeved shirt with no head opening you are right. After you sew up the seams you can try on your nearly completed shrug. open the bottom edge and put one arm into each sleeve..the top raw edge becomes the neckline and the bottom becomes the bottom hem. I kno...

This morning as I went to the subway the streets were filled with firemen dressed in their dress uniforms. Every year in the fall the fire department holds a memorial service  at the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive and 100th street. ( This image comes from NYC Parks ) Some years the local pubs and restaurants are filled with very sad ( and drunk firemen). I’m guessing that this was not the hardest of years in terms of loss. Some years you see the firemen walking away from the memorial with their faces full of pain. This year, not so much. As I walked to the subway I was joined by  groups of firemen making their way back home.  Firemen are big guys.  There were probably thirty of them on my subway car. I realized while looking at them that men who earn their livings through physical labor move differently than men who earn their livings sitting behind a desk. I also realized that you don’t often see men who earn their livings through physical labor in suit...