sarah in nyc

  Yesterday, when I came home from services this wonderful bundle of fabrics was left for me in a Trader Joe’s paper bag.  I have no idea who left it for me.   Four of the fabric are wonderful old style batiks printed on heavy cotton. These sorts of batiks were easy to find during the 1960’s and ‘70’s and are hard to find in this quality these days. They scream summer dress to me in that Harvard Square circa 1972 fashion that is so dear to my heart.  I may need to make a leather and wood ponytail holder to go with the dress and forget about shaving my armpits for a few months to get the full look. The other two fabrics are a circa 1986 drapery print and a Brunchwig & Fils silkscreened vaguely  Chinese drapery print.   I don’t know who to thank for this treasure trove. If it was you, let me know.  Now I can dress like my older sister’s beyond cool history teacher from 11th grade. Will it be a tunic dress with bell sleeves? or a sleevel...

First the food. That’s chicken with chestnuts, brown mushrooms and potatoes and fennel. The chicken is so adorable looking that I will serve it whole and carve it at the table. I know it’s an autumnal combination, but it’s been chilly. Actually it’s what I think of as menopause weather from moment to moment the weather flip flops from being balmy to bone chilling. So a hearty taste will be nice for tonight. I’m, also serving a kale salad dressed with sesame oil and rice vinegar. I will add bits of cara-cara oranges and pecans before serving. As always I’m grateful to my older son for his input and insight. He will ask me how I plan to cook each of the elements of the meal and offer tweaks and suggestions. I realize that I do the same for him as he cooks. It’s nice to have this sort of a dialogue going about the meals that I cook. It just makes it all come out better. The time has come for me to make a dress to wear to my niece’s wedding. My sister, the mother of the bride, has...

  Yesterday, while rooting through the bags of  textile goodies from Vivian I found this sweet bit of embroidery.   This linen cloth is place mat sized.  This is the only piece like this in the treasure trove that Vivian gave me. I don’t know if it was part of a placemat set or if it was made as a dresser scarf. Either way, it’s pretty adorable.   I am not going to go into the larger political issues involved in using imagery from other cultures as decorative motifs.  I am going to leave that to the political theorists.   What I do find interesting culturally about this piece of embroidery is that is uses exactly the same colors and techniques as linens my mother used to call “Swiss Embroidery” ( captured from http://cdn101.iofferphoto.com/img/item/139/668/589/Bi1F.jpg ) It’s sweet work, nicely done.  It will appear on a surface in my house in the next few months. meanwhile it is starched and ready  for it’s time in ...

When I work on a piece I know more or less where I am going to end up, but I don’t always know exactly how I’m going to get there.  Working on this atara/tallit neckband  for my nephew-to -be was one of those cases.   I knew I had to edge the atara. I don’t have my nephew- to -be’s tallit here for  reference in terms of color. I  didn’t want the soft colors of the atara to appear to weak and washed out next to the light blue of the tallit.  I was also worried that if the blue on the tallit had a greenish cast then the combination would look weak and sickly.   I  decided to make bias strips of a nice smoky blue cotton velveteen that’s been in my stash for a long time. I sewed the bias binding binding onto the  atara using the diamond stich on my machine and gold metallic thread. The result was both physically strong as well as being visually strong. The stronger blue pulled the colors and composition  a bit out of balance. T...

The events of the last week had my head and my heart very firmly in Boston.  I don’t think that I had anything particularly wise to add to the conversation, and it seemed frivolous to write about anything else, thus the silence.   The week was a mix of the horrific, made palatable by seeing acts of courage and kindness throughout that week.   I was however working on various things during the week as I listened to WBR, the Boston NPR station streaming as I worked. As I said, my head and my heart were very much in Boston. My husband always tells me that I don’t warn him when I’m about to change topics which often leaves him confused.  I’m now changing topics.     Each year that I have hosted Seder, my mother has polished up this Seder plate and brought it with her. She would take it back home with her when she returned to Boston. I believe that it was a wedding gift from one of my parents’ friends. This year, she told my sister to leave t...

In the weekend Wall Street Journal, Dan Arielli wrote a short piece about thinking about April 15 as Mitzvah Day. I am very grateful for his putting  a name to something that I have felt for a long, long time. My husband and I came back last night  from a week away on a completely bourgeois cruise to the Islands. Yes, it was wonderful. Visiting some of the islands on our tour got me thinking a whole lot about the value of good government. Again and again, our taxi drivers talked about government corruption and about the mixed blessing that tourism has been to the islands.  Several of the taxi drivers who drove us through one island or another talked about how their government just does not work and the difficulties that greed have caused most citizens. These pictures all show a visual paradise that also hides real corruption and poverty. Ant this brings me back to taxes.While it might be nice to have a bit more jingle in my pocket, ...

My youngest and I were both at the kitchen table this evening. He is making himself a duct tape wallet to replace the one he has lost earlier in the week. I am ironing some of the cloths and napkins that we used during Passover.   As I was ironing the napkins pictured below my son mentioned that when I die he does not want to inherit the napkins.  He went on a riff about how it’s stupid to have stuff and not use it. I responded that these napkins were probably about one hundred years old and were probably not used for the past many decades. They are part of my stash of Vivian treasures. I told my son that many people would not use the napkins because they were so old. I explained about how I liked using them.   As I ironed the dozen napkins I could see how they all had the same monogram but they were not exactly identical. Some of the monograms looked quite different from the back. I thought about how nice it was to use the napkins with my mother’s Israeli emb...

Via the magic that is the internet I just finished tying tzizit with Daphi in Jerusalem. Daphi is getting married in a few weeks and she and her husband plan to exchange tallitot under the chuppah. I had made Daphi her first tallit that she began to wear as a bat mitzvah a dozen years ago when she was living in New York. Daphi’s grandparents were friends and colleagues  of my parents. Her grandfather was a sharp cookie, a powerful man who made the lives of rabbis just much better.   The man Daphi is marrying is the grandson of one of my mother’s friends from her teenage years, Rochelle. I grew up with Rochelle’s daughters. We went to school together. Skype allowed Daphi and I to tie the tzitzit together, Daphi in Jerusalem and me in New York.  As she tied the knots we talked about her grandmother Jaqui, about eating meals at Rochelle’s table before she had died, about the sorts of elegant meals Rochelle set out.  I thought about all of the threads of fa...