Skip to main content

Various sorts of work, and also some real pleasures

This has been a busy week. Monday I made a tea for one of the people who hosted my son during his years in Israel. I don't think that our guest got that the table setting was an oddball homage to my mother and her elegant hostessing style. This dishes and the linens were a mix of things that had belonged to my mother and stuff that ended up in our house.I think everything played together nicely. I think if my mother had seen my table on Monday she first would have been a little put out by the mix of dishes and linens and then she might have decided that it looked a little crazy, but OK.  

Tuesday a dear friend was in town. She was my mentor at my earliest jobs here in New York. I think that we haven't seen one another in 15 years. My poor friend hasn't experienced a New York winter in a long time. I met her near where she was staying.

As I walked east on 73rd street I was completely puzzled by this white terracotta mid block building.
It stuck out like the proverbial thumb. It was probably put up at the same time as it's brownstone neighbors, in the 1890's. Perhaps a real estate speculator guessed wrong.
It's such an exuberant facade.

Visiting with my friend was a real pleasure.Hopefully there won't be quite so much time between our next visits.

I have put in more time on the tallit made with the vintage linens.  But I also have more work on my plate.


I am putting together a tallit for Jack with blue, gold and red stripes. Today I began on the blue and gold element of those stripes.

At the moment my work consists of sewing strips  of silk together, folding the long strips in half and then sewing the shorter halved together and repeating the procedure. This is actually the quickest way to get the task done. the stripes will be built up element by element and then pieced into the silk base. These colors make me very happy.

I also had a video chat meeting to help someone who has known me since before I was born make her tallit. Unfortunately the video quality was not great so I took these photos of possible materials to see what she liked.

These wonderful ribbons are no-doubt quite a few decades older than I am.

They are beautiful but the colors may be too strong for my client. 
I await her opinion. 


One of the things I love about working with clients is that I learn to work with colors that I might not otherwise think of using. Working with clients has taught me a tremendous amount about color. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
1 comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
2 comments
Read more