Working while in the middle of ---life

Amazon.com Widgets

When my oldest was a pre schooler someone had given her a beautiful book called The Napping House. In that book, all of the various occupants of the house first fall asleep and then wake up. The tagline of the book was "This is the napping house where everyone is sleeping." When my youngest is home from college and my husband is int he middle of his busy season, unlike The Napping House, at any moment of the 24-hour cycle, someone is sleeping, someone is awake and someone is eating.

With so much eating going on we had turned into a version of Mother Hubbard's kitchen. To stock our empty larders, we went to Costco. We went home with a taxi trunk filled with food.

I loved the twilight views from the back seat of our cab.

Our trip was delayed for a long time by a fender bender that luckily took place right in front of the emergency room of Metropolitan Hospital. We waited behind the excitement until it all got sorted out and then we were safely delivered home and our pantry and freezer are once again, full.

I realized that the hat I had made for my great-niece to be was nice, but needed something else to make it a truly wonderful hat.

The missing element was a pair of eyes. it took me several days to figure out the best way to go about creating eyes for this hat. Buttons are easy but are a potential choking danger to a baby.

I wanted to create eyes that were washable because anything that touches a baby is bound to get dirty.After pondering a variety of options I decided to make the eyes out of embroidered velveteen.

I drew a pair of eyes on the reverse of a scrap of cotton velveteen using a Sharpie. I then stitched over the drawn lines using my sewing machine. I stitched each iris using a mix of machine and hand stitching.

This is the result.

Living with a newborn can be difficult.

A silly hat can help make up for some of the misery of sleepless nights.

Comments

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

Search This Blog