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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מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

sarah in nyc

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