Currently on my plate

My cousin is getting married in a week and a half. It’s a black tie event. The bride comes from the land of sparkle, Long Island.

Several months ago my youngest was looking over my shoulder as I was internet fabric shopping. This sequin encrusted fabric was on sale. I was on the fence about buying it.

My son strongly encouraged me to buy it.

I have had this fabric sitting in a bag on the shelf for months but I haven’t done a thing about making the dress. I had been mentally designing this dress, thinking about and discarding a variety of options.

Because this fabric is sheet I decided to layer it over a tan scuba knit.

I know it’s a boring color but it’s meant to be that way. The fabric has so much going on.

After a whole bunch of dithering, I decided on the dress design.

It’s a really simple off the shoulder column dress. I have often mistakenly cut the necks of my dresses too wide and have inadvertently ended up with an off the shoulder dress. I sewed up the scuba fabric lining and my husband liked the shape of the dress and liked the off the shoulder neckline on me. The fabric is so busy that I figured that the simpler the better in terms of design. You can’t get too much simpler in terms of silhouette.

If I had been smarter I would have ordered more fabric. But I’m not smarter, so I have had to resort to come creative cutting. The dress back is seamed, partially to create a bit of shape and mostly so I will be able to eke out enough of the sequin fabric.

All of the beige scuba is cut out and two thirds of the sequined fabric is cut and edge stitched to the scuba lining. My dining room looks like it has snowed sequins.

Hopefully I will get the dress completed by the end of this week.

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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