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

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee.  If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it.    My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid.  I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed.   A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee  and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
1 comment
Read more

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

 I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night.  I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1)  אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה  God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2)  אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר   May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3)  יָאֵר יְהֹ...
8 comments
Read more

A Passover loss

 My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of  linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin.  You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...
2 comments
Read more