sarah in nyc

A couple of days ago  this dress showed up on my Facebook stream. It's from one a grown up version of those Chinese websites that show really inexpensive clothing for women. I was smitten with the dress. I loved the  slightly odd colors. I adored the shape. I visited the site and looked at the image a few times.  Then every website I visited showed ads featuring this dress. My Facebook feed included images of the dress. I started thinking about the dress a lot...a whole lot.  I suppose that if I didn't sew I would have been forced by the sheer power of suggestion to shell out the $99 and buy the dress. Instead I thought about the dress and figured out the basic shape. I recognized that this is essentially a rounded variation of the wide-side dresses that I keep making, mostly because I am a wide-sided girl. I had a length of fabric in a similarly weird color that my daughter had gotten as a freebie for me at one of her previous jobs. I am going to pr...

Today is my mother's birthday. Amazon.com Widgets In her honor I am posting some photos of her from the grand tour of Europe she and my father did in 1955. When my parents got married in 1953 their honeymoon consisted of a couple of days in Atlantic City (they took the bus there) and a few days visiting friends at Camp Ramah in Connecticut. Two years later they decided to do  the sort of honeymoon they might have done if either of them had wealthy families. Their financial situation hadn't changed all that much. But my mother decided that they should live off of my father's salary and bank her Hebrew school teacher earnings so they could do this grand tour. This was a decision that gave both of them a great deal of joy.  They stayed in fancy hotels in London, Paris, Rome and all over Israel.  They spent a week in each of the European cities and a month in Israel.  My parents ran into an old friend at the base of the Eiffel tower. He probably...

Today is a day filled with complicated news. I am not going to address the complicated global issues swirling around us. Amazon.com Widgets Earlier today, one of  my childhood friends re-posted   this article  on how to make home made Hoodsies. For those of you NOT from New England, a Hoodsie was a staple at every birthday party of my childhood. It was a small cardboard cup filled half with chocolate ice cream and half with vanilla. There was a small wax coated tabbed cardboard lid that always lifted off the cup with a thin layer of ice cream perfect to lick. A Hoodsie was always packaged with a paper wrapped wooden paddle you used as a spoon. A Hoodsie was delightful for kids. it was inexpensive for parents to buy. A Hoodsie was easy to serve at the end of a birthday party after the cake. Every kid got the same amount of ice cream and you didn't have to worry about 20 different kids' individual likes or dislikes.The quality of the ice cream was fine, perfect fo...

Yesterday, my husband and I had a reception to attend across Madison Square from his office. I waited for my husband for a few minutes. Amazon.com Widgets The reception was lovely with lots of adorable passed tidbits and lots of delicious curated wine. We wandered back across the park to head home.  This sculpture was cool to look at. But the accompanying text which you see my husband reading was so completely irritating that it made me instantly hate the sculpture that a minute before I had found fairly charming. Sometimes people don't know when it is better to say less. As we continued our walk we passed St.Saba, the Serbian church that suffered a catastrophic fire several weeks ago. We Continues walking only to discover that it was Manhattanhendge, one of the nights when the sunset exactly lines up with the city grid. It is always a completely impressive experience. I am adding some fire escape photos from Sunday. if I wer...

I have been working since last week on the border for Jean's atara/tallit neckband. The border serves both ta visual function and well as a structural one. Visually, just about anything looks better with a good border. ideally the border will repeat or emphasis elements that are found elsewhere in a tallit, its a visual coda. Amazon.com Widgets From a structural point of view a good border serves the same function as those round white loose-leaf reinforcements that most of us used in elementary school. It gives an area of tallit that gets a fair amount of wear some additional stability. The fabulous silk Jean chose for her tallit has a complicated strip pattern with straight stripes as well as squiggly zig zaggy stripes woven into the fabric.  I realized that if I embroidered a ribbon with a combination of stitches and threads I could create something similar to the look of the stripes on the silk. Given the size of the atara that meant embroidering 68 inches of r...

Our kids suggested celebrating their father at the Lower East Side Egg Cream, Eggroll and Empanada  festival would be a good idea. We took the subway from 96th street.  Amazon.com Widgets My husband wore a shirt the kids and I made for him on a Fathers Day long ago back when we only had two kids. My husband wears it every Fathers Day. This is just one way that he exhibits his excellence as a father. When we got to the festival it was smaller than we expected and really crowded. My youngest suggested that instead we go eat lunch at Vegetarian Dim Sum, which serves, you guessed it, vegetarian dim sum. Here is my satisfied family. After we ate we went to the Chinese supermarket under the Manhattan Bridge. We had some supplies that we needed to buy.  We had by that point walked off enough of lunch so there was room for dessert at the Chinatown Ice Cream factory. It was a hot day so of course there was a line. So I took photos of my famil...