Phase one of Passover Prep has Officially Begun

Now that I’m no longer hacking my guts out, I can do what Jewish women around the world are doing. getting ready for Passover.

 

For me the first stage is doing some of the cleaning tasks that I can ignore during the year.  My youngest was really helpful tonight. We got a whole lot done.

One of my pre- Passover tasks is washing the kitchen curtain, which is actually my aunt’s mid –century modern  table cloth.  After I put it in the wash I decided to do something radical and put up a different vintage cloth as my kitchen curtain.

 

This cloth was my mother-in –law’s. I think that it is from the 1940’s.  I love it because it exactly expresses how my mother-in law used to serve a meal. If you ate a meal at her house there was never just one protein served at the meal. There would be chicken plus meatballs plus another sort of chicken. The same went for the starches and the vegetables. My mother-in-law always worried that maybe her guests would prefer a different choice.

 

This cloth has not just strawberries, it also has raspberries and cherries, just in case you prefer one over the other.

The print was a bit unfocused. Actually, truth be told, so was my mother-in-law.  So, I added three red bordered linen  napkins from the vast trove of linens that my friend Vivian gave, me as a valance. I believe that the linen luncheon napkins were from Europe.

 

Earlier in the week I recovered some of our chairs.

I had done a small home- dec  job for our neighbors who are staging their house for sale. They  gave me some of the left over fabric from when they had recovered their living room furniture. I used some if it for the project ( making a circular bordered tablecloth)

 

Some of our chairs live primarily in either the kitchen or the dining room. But when we have a big dinner, all the chairs get put out  in the dining room. It’s nice to have the upholstery coordinate. the chairs themselves are a hodgepodge.

 

The one below came with the apartment when my husband moved in in 1978.I have recovered this chair about four times since the mid 1980’s

Some we purchased at apartment sales in our building. Some I found on the street. A couple were thrown out by neighbors.

 

The next few days will be filled with lots of cleaning and then the shopping and cooking Olympics begin again.