sarah in nyc

Today is my mother's third yahrzeit.  I went to Shacharit and led p'sukei d'zimra. I began services with מודה אני, singing it the way my mother used to when I was still sleeping in a crib. I ended p'sukei d'zimra using one of the melodies I sang to my mother as she was dying. We have been swamped with wedding related stuff but I needed to see my doctor on the Upper East Side. Her office had moved and on the way, I saw two familiar sights. Far-N-Wide used to be one of my favorite stores on 86th street. I used to visit during my lunch hours while I was working at the 92nd Street Y. The store was filled with jewelry from around the world that I lusted after. I bought some gifts there for friends but never bought anything for myself. Good friends of mine from college lived in I think the red apartment building. It felt like I was seeing old friends next to one another. This carrot was in this week's chicken soup. And in our pre-weddi...

Like everyone else who is on the internet, my Facebook feed these days is filled with ideas for hamentashen. I assume that those of you who bake will be pulling out recipes this Sunday to have them ready to give out on Purim. Before you start to bake, I am going to give you a gift.  The gift is a recipe for the best hamentashen on the planet. My friend Marla is a beautiful writer, a wonderful photographer, and a really excellent cook. Marla's grandmother's Hamentashen  The link includes both a lovely essay and the recipe. Make them Hamentashen should be made out of a soft smooth fine-grained dough. I often describe it as leathery, I know that sounds gross but if you think not of shoe-leather but say fine kidskin but in dough form, that's what a good hamentash should be made out of. A crumbly sugar cookie has its place, but not connected to hamentashen. My sister loves to tell a story of the elderly uncle of a friend who was in a coma.  it looked like the ...

Well, I have a whole lot to talk about this post. First of all news of the world hangs heavy this week.I am thinking about those poor kids killed in school THIS week as well as all of the other recent senseless shootings. I also often think about Russian interference in the election and in general mucking about on the internet. One of the cool things I can do as the owner of this blog is seeing where my readers come from, no, not your home address, but the country readers come from.  Most of my readership comes from the United States. I always have a fair number of readers from Canada, from Israel, and from the UK. Some of those people are relatives and some are friends and others are people I know from the sewing world. Every day my "audience" page tells me that I have readers from Russia. Sometimes it is just a few. Sometimes it is several hundred. Some days I click on the pages that send traffic my way. Often it is blogs written by sewing friends. often the Russian s...

 I have been working on more wedding related stuff. Amazon.com Widgets The kippot are all completed. I think I finished the shawls. Yes, they need a better pressing but don't worry, the attendants won't look like they slept in their finery. This is the stencil that I used for the scarves. No, I didn't use the elephant. The stencil itself isn't perfect (I would have preferred a more complex design) but it does well enough. Surprisingly the hardest bit of all of this turquoise and gold fabulousness has been creating the pocket squares.  I have experienced several failures along the way. One layer of this silk is NOT fun to work with. The pocket squares are all going to be self-lined. For some reason I don't quite understand, precutting the pocket squares and stenciling them works less well than stenciling a long length of fabric and then cutting it up. So after much too much time, I have three pocket squares completed and I think s...

I have been exchanging emails with my friend Liz. Her daughter is getting married and wanted to repurpose both her mother's wedding dress and her future mother-in-law's wedding dress into something wonderful for her wedding. Yesterday was one of those rainy gross days that makes you want to just say in bed. My mother used to say about days like that, while reverting to her deepest Brooklyn accent., "I shoulda stood in bed". Liz showed up in the gross rain with two wedding dresses in tow. One was in a dry cleaner's bag (covered with a heavy black garbage bag against the rain). Liz's dress was similarly sheathed in a black garbage bag but it had been preserved in a box. Before she unveiled the box, I mentioned to Liz how the daughter of one of my mother's friends had paid to have a wedding dress preserved. They wanted to lend the dress to a friend, opened the box and saw that not only had it not been preserved, the dress hadn't even been ...

The attendants walking down the aisle will be wearing black dresses and shawls that I am stenciling. Amazon.com Widgets I purchased the stencils and this is what one side of one shawl looks like. This length of fabric will be folded in half the long way and sewn into a long 14-inch wide shawl. Each shawl will be similar but not identical. I am making stenciled pocket squared for those attendants wearing black suits. I am still not ready to show my work. All of the males in the bridal party will get turquoise kippot embellished with gold block printing, stenciling, and embroidery. Again, no two are identical but they all work together.  The regular wedding guests get their kippot unembellished. I am not entirely nuts.

It is completely gross out.The weathermen call this "wintery mix". I call it flying slop. When you walk around my neighborhood in this sort of weather each corner is an obstacle course. The corners all flood, but all do it differently.  You need to create a strategy for crossing each corner. Some require you to walk up the block a bit to where the land might be just a bit higher. Other intersections require you to walk into traffic so you don't wade in water that is halfway up your knees. Some corners require a long jump. It is one experience to do this walk on my own. It was quite another experience when I was pushing a stroller or walking with a short child ( and pushing a stroller). When my oldest was in middle school or high school she was doing a project about the history of our neighborhood. One of the facts she discovered is the reason that our corners flood so badly in wet weather. When the streets we laid out at the end of the 19th...

As I was working out yesterday morning I kept watching the birds in the trees across the street. Later in the day, I loved the late afternoon sunlight reflected off of the red brick building on the corner. Amazon.com Widgets

 Tonight we have no company. It still made sense to cook a serious amount of food some of it will go into the freezer for a later and more hectic time. Amazon.com Widgets Every time I cook whole chickens I am stunned by how completely adorable they are once cooked. I will probably serve our chicken whole and carve at the table. I roasted a few pounds of string beans and made challot. This week it was Tu B'shvat. Aside from being the new year for the trees, it is the day when my mother marked her mother's Yahrzeit. A couple of days ago my friend Sue posted a series of frantic posts on facebook about her father's declining health his being moved into hospice stuff about the complexities of travel during these times and finally her father's death. While following these posts I thought about how while I was going through that same frantic time before my mother's death and the crazed time after her death, it was Sue who called me up and took me out for ...

Yesterday I met two of my sewing buddies for lunch and a visit to the museum at FIT. The big Norman Norell exhibit is not due to open for another couple of weeks, but it is always good to look at great clothing with these particular friends. This fabulous dress opened the exhibit. It is made out of woven plastic measuring tapes. It is probably hideously uncomfortable to wear but it made all of us very happy to look at it. The exhibit  was sort of loosely organized around the themes. Some of the exhibits at FIT are put together so well that they completely re-arrange my brain. This exhibit didn't have that power but there were some lovely garments to see. I loved the graphic look of this bustle underpinnings.  These two dresses come from about the same time. The smocked brown velvet looks like the winter version of the college graduation dress my mother bought me. The Paul Poiret dress to the right could not have been worn at any other mo...