Feeling pleased with my own cleverness

When I un-picked all of the miles of lace from the edges of Gavi's wedding dress

I realized that some of the lace, especially the bits that had been on the bottom hem of the dress had gotten a bit greyish and dingy. It really needed to be clean before I attached the lace to the silk double Georgette. The bit of schmutz might not matter at the back of the hem of a dress but it would be noticeable on a tallit.

I can't calculate all of the books of early 20th century helpful home hints I have read since I was in grade school. I am a person of odd passions. I had a period of time when I was little when I had a crush on dump trucks. But I have been reading collections of home hints probably since I was seven or eight ( not long after my dump truck love).

Many of these hints are not exactly useful in my every day life, although I do know how to construct a fireless cooker if the need ever arises. As I looked at my big spool of shmnutzy lace I realized that washing miles of loose lace would just create a giant spaghetti-like mess of hard to control lace that was liable to rip during the stress of washing. I remembered one book had mentioned that a good way to clean a long length of lace trim was to wind it onto a coated metal frame and washed in a solution of water and grated laundry soap and then allowed to dry and then pressed on a "heavy Turkish towel".

In the 1920's such devices were probably easily available in your local dry-goods store.Since we no longer live in an age where dry goods stores exist, I knew I had to figure something else out.

Long ago I had purchased some lace on plastic reels. I know for sure that those reels have long since been tossed in the recycling bin. I did have some lace trim that was wound onto cardboard, but the cardboard was useless for washing purposes. I visited the dollar store to see if anything there might work. I came up dry.

This morning I began searching my kitchen to see if anything might fit the bill. I found exactly the right tool on my kitchen windowsill. My dishwasher came with entirely too many silverware containers. This unused one would be perfect for the job.

I began to wind the lace around the silverware container.

I used the lid to hold the ends of the lace firmly.

I filled a bucket with hot water and added Oxy-clean and added my improvised reel and reeled lace to the bucket.

I let the lace soak for a few minutes and then

Pulled it out and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed the lace.

I wrapped the lace bundle in two Turkish towels

to absorb most of the moisture

and set the bundle to dry on a window sill.

The washed lace is much whiter. Tomorrow I will press the lace.

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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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