Why I do my own work - and a bit of Food Friday

Often people are surprised that I do all of my own sewing, that I don't contract contract out my work or at least hire assistants. I think there is an assumption out there that the designer comes up with a sketch and that is the smart work and then the "little hands" as they are known in the French couture world brainlessly bring the ideas of the designer to fruition.

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I am both ends of the equation, I both come up with the big ideas and do every bit of the sewing. I find that this is in fact a strength. I have discovered over and over again that only with the actual manipulation of the materials I am able to elevate my work to something just better than it would be if I handing off the sewing to someone else.

Right now I am finishing up two tallitot, Jane's which is made out of precious family textiles and Jack's which is being made out of all new materials. Yesterday each of these projects presented me with a moment where I realized that the fact that I do every bit of the work makes each one a better piece.

I had reached a bit of an impasse with Jane's tallit.

As you can see here, the edges of the tallit are raw, and unfinished and need a proper finishing. I was not sure what the right edging would be. I wanted the edging to be unobtrusive and yet strong enough to take the hard wear that a tallit gets.

After rummaging in my stash I decided on making a binding for those edges out of white silk chiffon cut on the bias. It would be visually unobtrusive. Before I cut into the chiffon I thought about two things. One is that silk chiffon is a bear to cut accurately. it is even more persnickety when you cut it on the bias. Not only that, silk chiffon isn't really all that strong.

As part of my process of temporarily shelving that decision I got busy on Jack's tallit. I got a great deal of it done but then had to figure out how to edge his atara. Jack wanted his tallit to be decorated with blue and gold but he also kept mentioning that he wanted red in the tallit. So I rummaged through the ribbons in my stash and found a roll of blue striped narrow ribbon. Both jack and I didn't want the tallit to look like an American flag so getting the balance of the colors was crucial.

I embroidered the red diamonds on the ribbon, and then sewed the ribbon onto the atara/neckband with a wide gold zigzag.

If I had simple handed over the work to an assistant, i don't think such a good solution would have been reached.

It was time to go back to Jane's tallit and figure out the right edging. I did what I do when I am desperate and began tidying up my work space. I then rediscovered the linen that the beautiful lace was inserted into to.

Linen comes in various qualities with different characteristics. Some linen is fairly unprocessed and is full of flax stalks. There is some that has been bleached to a nasty greyish white. Some is pure white and as smooth at satin. The linen from jane's grandmother was smooth and finely woven. It was lightweight enough to fold easily into a bias binding.

So I made a bias binding out of the leftover linen. Functionally it was perfect. Even more so, it will be meaningful for Jane that that tallit that is all about her grandmother's beautiful linens is edged with some of that special linen.

We were invited for Shabbat dinner tonight. I am bringing Challah. My husband is under the weather and he is staying home. he wanted the rest of us to enjoy our evening with our friends.

I made him little challot, ( they are on their second rise now) and cooked him chicken .

He might be dining alone tonight but he will be dining well.

For those of you who want to know this week's chicken flavor, I rubbed the chicken with the tandoori spices my son bought me for Chanukah.

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...

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...

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 ...

sarah in nyc

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