sarah in nyc

Today I completed two new challah covers.   the text of this one comes from a kavanah/ intentional prayer that is recited by some before reciting kiddush. I had fallen in love with the straw colored silk shantung with the subtle stripe. I had thought it would be perfect for tallit making, but my clients apparently didn’t think so.   It’s a slightly unusual color palate. I think I may have been influenced by all of the 1920’s sewing books that I have been reading lately. The lavender velvet border just makes the center sing. The aqua velvet binding was a vintage steal I had found at Paron before they moved. I think it was from the 1950’s. I backed and bordered this piece that I had shown in extreme close up in an earlier post. I wasn’t able to get the colors to read properly so will have to make another attempt to take pictures.   The text comes from one of the z’mirot liturgical poems that are sung during the Shabbat meals. The theme of this...

Today I walked home from a morning appointment in the neighborhood. One of the reasons I love living here so much is the variety of visual textures. I thought I would share some of what I saw today. The older iron work is becoming rare. I love this intact fire escape.   One of my favorite buildings in the neighborhood is West End Presbyterian Church. The building looks almost like a textile.    I love the contrast between the ceramic decorative tiles and the glazed brick.   The “more is more”,  school of decoration  rules here.The rhythms of decoration though are soothing rather than jarring. Stone and brick work through the neighborhood is varies. The decay of older fixes also catches my eye.   We don’t think of Manhattan as being very green, but bits of foliage punctuate the landscape.   Last week we had visitors from out of town. They commented that here in new york they found themselves walking muc...

This is tonight’s chicken,  a mindless preparation of the juice of two lemons, lots of black pepper and paprika. it is then in the language of our household, “cooked to death”. My son baked the challah this week. If you were here you would be very happy smelling how good the apartment smells right now.   This has been a really hard week. Actually it’s been a hard six weeks. There have been various medical issues going on in my body and various  doctors deciding if things were fine or very not fine. It seems at the moment like things are fine, ( for real) but the road there has been hmmmmmm, crummy.   I decided to make myself a dress as a reward for making through a crummy time. A few months ago I fell in love with a length of undyed knit linen with a gold metallic over wash.   I have been admiring the fabric since the spring and have been envisioning the dress I would make. I thought I would make a sleeveless dress with a cowl front.   I...

It’s really hot out. That means that I tend to cook food that comes from hot weather counties.   This pilaf got cooked in the oven at the same time as the chicken. The chicken, since you asked was made with lots of black pepper and pomegranate molasses. This vaguely middle eastern spiced stewed eggplant cooks up quickly on the stove top. Summer time is also the right time for marinated vegetables. The multi-colored vegetables happily living in the same bowl are going to serve as my slightly stilted segue to the Zimmerman  verdict. My kids were fortunate enough to attend PS 75 here on the Upper West Side. One of the the things that is truly special about the school is that unlike many other public elementary schools in New York it is truly economically and racially diverse. The school population includes both kids who live in Riverside Drive penthouses as well as kids who live in the projects.  I would guess that the school is about  1/3 white, 1/3 b...

This out of my usual wheel house project is now done. T-shirt quilts are pretty ubiquitous in the world of quilting. Usually they are of the stuff in a grid format. If you look at any sewing or quilting catalog you can buy directions for a t- shirt quilt. I had begun my sewing life by making quilts.  I have done more than my share of class quilts for my kids’ various schools. For several years I had also made chuppot  made out of squares of stuff donated by family members. I have made lots of quilts that are things arranged in a grid. I hit my limit and resolved to never do another grid based quilt. I constructed this throw in three long strips. Each strip was a different shirting fabric backed with a layer of cotton flannel. getting all of the shirt bits to work together was a fun challenge. I had to make the rhythm of each strip work both on it’s own as well as in relation to it’s two neighbors. Each of the t-shirt bits was sewn with a wide zig zag stitch. I liked the ...

When I was a college senior I shared an apartment with three friends. One afternoon I was alone in the kitchen doing homework and the drinking glasses we had set on the counter to dry began doing the most extraordinary thing. They seemed to waddle to the edge of the counter and then leap to their deaths on the floor. I intervened after one and perhaps two of the lemming tumblers leapt to their deaths on the kitchen floor. My room mates asked me why I hadn’t intervened before the first glass had leapt to it’s demise. I replied that I found the line of waddling glasses so completely fascinating that I simply had to watch. Before you decide that I’m completely off my rocker, there was actually a rational reason for our lemming tumblers. Our kitchen was on the other side of the wall from the laundry room. The vibration from the washing machines  through the shared wall is what caused the death of our glasses.     Yesterday morning though, we had a similar act of hou...