I have been otherwise distracted

I had been hoping for the past few days to be able to write about this beautiful batch of ribbons my friend Pearl had dropped off for me.

This is about half of the generous haul. Pearl's mother who died a year or so ago died at well over 100. She was a sewer for all of her life. Pearl's dad was in the children's trimming business. Pearl has been clearing out her mother's apartment. the beautiful lace cloth under the stack of ribbons comes from Pearl's mother.

These ribbons are quite old. the ribbon spools are interleaved with paper to protect the silk. A few have brand labels.

Most of the ribbons are silk taffeta in white or pastel pink or blue.

Quite a few of the spools have never been opened.

I love how the ribbons are pinned to show how they look both flat and gathered. I don't know if you can see the tiny flat headed pins holding that ribbon twist in place. While spooling the ribbons and the paper onto the wooden spoons would have been done by machine, each of those ribbons would have been threaded through the paper slit and then pinned into [place by hand. It isn't surprising that no one sells ribbon packaged like this anymore.

My favorite spool of ribbon in the batch is a partial spool of ribbon binding. it is beyond adorable.

I also didn't get the opportunity to write about my progress on my future son-in-law's tallit. There is more work to be done but it is starting to look like something.

I haven't been posting because I got hit with food poisoning on New Year's Day and am still recovering. As I began thinking about this post that knew that it was really the mother of adult children when it is my kids who were cleaning up my barf off the floor, rather than the other way around. I am on the mend but i am still only up to eating the blandest of food.

We have relatives visiting and many dinners out which I have had to decline.At the moment food is not my friend.

The nicest thing of all is that

the adored baby in this photo, my nephew, just became the father of a baby girl.

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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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