A little work and a little bit of play(finally!)

The work part of my day was being interviewed about the possibility of a teaching gig. Things are looking good and it should be a nice addition to my summer.

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I had planned to visit the Musuem of Art and Design with my youngest after the interview. He met me at the museum. I was dying to see the Judith Leiber exhibit. The last big exhibit of her work was at FIT just over 20 years ago years ago. When THAT exhibit was up I took my older son who was then really little to fill up the time between the end of his day at day care at the time we had to pick my daughter up at her school bus. My son was so enchanted by the exhibit that he asked to go back several times, and we did.

The current exhibit was fine but had none of the magic that the brilliant Valerie Steele adds to every exhibit at FIT. We saw cool pocketbooks, but no magic.

We stopped by this exhibit. I might not be clever enough to understand the premise of the exhibit. It seems to be made up of random clothing-ish related pieces. I did LOVE this installation sleeves.

This would have been cool enough on it's own but an accompanying film explains how designer Lucy Jones is making clothing specifically to meet the needs of people who have physical challenges. These sleeves have been designed for women who can't straighten their arms.

I expected to hate the exhibit on Counter Culture Clothing. Instead, I was completely delighted by it.

Some of the garments were clearly made as stage-wear.

Some were familiar to me from craft books and articles I remembered reading in the 1970's.

I was entirely smitten by the dense large scale cross stitching on this old army coat. The mix of the subtle colors and the rough stitching was so sophisticated and unexpected.

Some garments suffered from a bit too much of too much.

I was struck by how labor intensive so many of the garments were.

This skirt and top were made out of bed sheets completely covered with spectacular embroidery.

At first glance, I thought that this vest was simply faded denim.But it has been embroidered to mimic faded denim.

Clearly, people had time to embellish.

I remember some of these garments because I wore similar ones. Oh! the great lure of prairie dresses for those of us who attended bar and bat mitzvah parties in the early 1970's.

Versions of this denim skirt made out of jeans have appeared in every DIY fashion book since 1969. This is a particularly nice one that has been made with real skill. My cool friends were wearing short versions of this skirt in 1974.

One of my older sisters sewed and I believe that she owned the Vogue version of this pattern.

Even my mother in law owned a dashiki shirt.

There were garments that were deeply familiar to me.

My older sister used to embroider ready made men's chambray shirts for herself. . This is the sort of woerk she might have done in the early 1970's.

We all embroidered our jeans and our denim skirts.

Some of my parents' cooler friends might have worn something like this. I don't quite understand the mania then for body armor like jewelry. It does look cool but it must have weighted a ton, I also assume that your friends couldn't hug you if you wore that assemblage.

My son dubbed this "sexy grandma clothes".

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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