Passover Cleaning

I would have been nice to just relax after the wedding, perhaps go to a spa for a couple of days. Alas, the Jewish calendar had other plans for me. Passover is sooooooon and the house needs to be cleaned up and changed over so I can start my marathon cooking.

I am going through drawers and cabinets and have unearthed some pieces that are part of the earliest part of my textile collection.


Inspired by Roots aired on TV, I just checked and it was 1977, my mother got interested in her family history. She began by asking her sister who was thirteen years older than she was about family stories. My Aunt Sheva (Sophie in English)lived in Jerusalem but would spend the summers here in the states dividing her time between her daughter's home in Brooklyn and our home in Quincy. The two sisters wrote to one another weekly during the year but cherished the weeks they spent together during the summers.

At around that time( perhaps a year or two earlier) my mother lent me her mother's nightgown to wear as a dress to a dinner we had been invited to.

My mother replaced the shredded pink ribbon with olive green and brown grosgrain. She washed the dress and starched it and I wore it with an olive green macrame belt that Aunt Sheva had made.

 I remember looking carefully and the lace and realizing that it had been pieced out of a mix of factory-made laces.

I wore Mama's nightgown as a dress a few times. It has been sitting in a bag since I was seventeen. The cotton batiste has become fairly fragile since I last wore the dress. I put it back in the bag (from the Concord hotel swimming pool).


Around the same time my mother lent me the nightgown, Aunt Sheva gave my mother this beautiful half slip that had also been my grandmother's. Sheva thought that I might wear it as a skirt.

I don't quite remember why I didn't. Perhaps the small repairs that needed to be done were beyond my then meager sewing skills. It needed a new elastic at the waistband.

This sweet nightgown or slip was also my grandmother's. I never wore it but the three pieces lived together in my mother's cedar chest. It's a machine made eyelet simple bodice with a bias cut skirt and an attached ruffle of another eyelet. 

This may have been made at home quite easily or it may have been store bought. Directions for this sort of simple garment were widely available. Although my grandmother was not a great seamstress one of the things she did know how to make from scratch, including making up a newspaper pattern for making it up was a slip. She worked on making herself a slip right after she moved in with us after my grandfather died.

I guess my Aunt Sheva knew that I liked old handwork because a few summers later, she gave me this apron.

Sheva told me that a friend had given it to her and she would give it to me on condition that I promised to wear it.  I remember being impressed with the handwork. I did wear it on a couple of Friday nights in Camp Ramah over a black cotton Indian wrap skirt with multicolored embroidery at the hem.

I think Sheva may have told me that it was Portuguese. As I look at it today, it looks Eastern European to me.

I wonder if it was a gift from one of my aunt's Russian neighbors in Jerusalem. My aunt used to teach them Hebrew and try to acclimate them to Israel. I never met them but I know that they had trouble with her name and instead of calling her Sophie ( as she was known outside of the family) they called her G'veret (Mrs.) Sofa. I just loved that name and often thought of my aunt as being G'veret Sofa

I have not worn the apron since the summer I was 21, but it has lived in a bag in my underpants drawer in each of the apartments I have lived in since that summer.

 The work on the apron is still really impressive. The holes in the lace look terrible but are probably an easy fix but I am not going to work on it right now.

My parents' dear friend Father Blute is someone I now think of as being my bachelor uncle. Father Blute shared many interests with my parents and we often went antiquing together or to museums.  Father Blute was so often at our table, so often that he really wasn't company but more like a relative who lived nearby and would stop by for a cup of tea or a meal.

Father Blute's mother made potholders for the church bazaar.  She would often send a few along for her son to give to my mother. For about fifteen years all of our potholder's were Mary Blute's handiwork.

These are the last three of those potholders. I am very fond of them.

Before I stop writing I just want to share one more picture.

A few days before the wedding my met my daughter and her intended in a Starbucks to go over some last minute details and to try the fascinator on my daughter.

Here she is wearing my handiwork. If you look closely you can see the reflection of her now husband admiring her.