A whole lot of a whole lot of stuff

I have been working on more wedding related stuff.

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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 seven left to go.

But there is life beyond this wedding. A sweet young man is having his bar mitzvah at the end of April and I am making his tallit.

He was adopted from Ethiopia. His mom was sent to me because I have some experience creating tallitot made with fabrics that come from a variety of cultures. She had some Ethiopian fabrics that she hoped could be incorporated sensitively into the tallit. The tallit needed to show the deep connection to Ethiopia but not look like a costume.

We met a couple of weeks ago. When it was time, the Ethiopian fabrics were pulled out. One of the fabrics looked very much like these fabrics.

It was exactly the right size for the bar mitzvah boy to use as a tallit. All I needed to do was add pinot/corner pieces and a neckband and we could be done. This multicolored woven fabric did not make the heart of this bar -mitzvah boy sing.

The second fabric pulled out of the bag did.

This scarf with the fabulous woven stripe in a rich coppery brown is gorgeous. The color is spectacular with the bar-mitzvah boy's skin. This would work by itself as a tallit if this 12-year-old had his bar mitzvah this week. But this is the age when 12-year-old boys grow like weeds. I would bet a large amount of money that by the time this bar-mitzvah boy is fourteen it will be too small for him.

So we had to come up with an alternative plan. Two fabrics from my stash will make up the main body of the tallit. One is a natural colored raw silk woven with threads of silver and gold Lur-ex. atara will be made out of the plain woven fabric.

The other fabric is a black and taupe striped silk, the black stripes are shantung and the taupe is a heavy corded raw silk.

The beautiful Ethiopian weaving will serve as the pinot and the

Today I cut the silk to size and edged it with my serger.

The striped silk is doubled for stability and longer wear.

We have PLANS for the atara. They are not yet finalized but I am excited about our initial ideas.

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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