sarah in nyc

My son and I both had optometrist appointments at Costco and it was a challah baking week which required a bit of complicated scheduling of all of the cooking and baking. I set up the challah for its first rise right after breakfast. The challah and the chicken can't cook in the oven at the same time. So just before we left I had my son braid the challot and set them out to rise.  The chicken was about halfway done (cooking at 350) as we were about to walk out the door. I turned the heat down on the chicken to 285 and hoped that it would be cooked by the time we got home a few hours later.  I had the chicken stay in the oven while I preheated it for the challah at 420. That actually worked out perfectly. Had it been cooler out, the challah would have been fine, but alas it is a hot day and our challah is over-risen and is a bit deflated by the whole experience. A couple of weeks ago I taught my younger son how to sew on a button. Since then he has been repairi...

In 2011, Hilary gave me the honor of making a tallit out of old family textiles. you can read about both   starting Hilary's tallit  as well as  completing Hilary's tallit . When I made this tallit I was concerned about how much life was left in the over 100-year-old silk that had been Hilary's great- grandfather's tallit. Last night Hilary brought me the tallit in hopes that I could extend the life of the tallit a bit.  This is what arrived to my house last night (along with Hilary and her delightful kids who are no longer little kids but are now delightful adolescents). The 120-year-old silk is shredding. I assume that none of us will be looking all that fresh and perky at 120 years old either.  This tallit was created to mark the end of what Hilary had called "the death years".  She had been for a hard period dealt with the decline and death of several loved ones who are represented in this tallit. If the black st...

My dear buddy Ann was in town and we had set aside today for a visit. She asked to go to the garment district. She was looking for two specific fabrics. One was a basic navy blue rayon knit. The other was a pie in the sky desire a beautiful embroidered mesh that Ann had seen made up into a fancy t-shirt. The rayon knit ended up being an easy find. In fact, we found exactly the right knit in two different shades of navy in two different stores, one at a not bad $6 per yard and the other at an even better $5 per yard. Ann bought both because a plain blue rayon knit is one of those things a girl can't own too much of. As much as we are all seduced by fabulous, outrageous fabric, what we wear most often is the basic stuff. So we used the embroidered mesh as an excuse to focus our looking as we wandered from store to store. Depressingly we noticed that several stores on the north side of 39th street are all shuttered up. But went we went to 38th street we were both happy to see t...

This has been a week of truly depressing news. I have been thinking deeply about the many issues brought up by the news of the week. I just haven't the stomach to discuss them here at the moment. A dear friend has invited us to dinner. I am bringing challah and these flowers. In light of the crumminess in the world, I am including several photos that I have taken over the last week or so. I am including them in the hopes that some of the beauty will counteract some of the bad taste that is probably in all of our mouths. I found myself charmed by shadows.  My new cell phone has a camera that some quirks. It has some trouble capturing night time scenes but transforms nighttime light into something quite magical. Here are three increasingly abstract images of the same intersection  Earlier in the week, we were in New Jersey. I took these photos on the way home. This is the George Washington Bridge as seen from the side window of ...

One of my sisters can't travel all that easily so she asked me to visit  the Bill Cunningham Exhibit  in her stead. Today was a good day to go. I had suspected that the exhibit was in the tiny exhibition space on the second floor, and it was.  Most of the exhibit was devoted to the excellent documentary about Bill Cunningham which I had already seen. Cunningham had spent much of his early life in fashion as a milliner. He adored feathers and many of his hats and hair ornaments are full of feathers. If you aren't in New York, watch the Bill Cunningham documentary, the exhibit isn't worth a special visit to the city or to the museum. But right down the hall, there was a fabulous exhibit on the use of feathers in fashion. It seemed almost like a sly dig at Cunningham's use of feathers. The use of feathers in fashion drove some bird species to extinction. Aigrettes, in particular, are now extinct due to their being so highly desired in hat making...

After being away for two weeks, it was nice to be back at my sewing machine. My youngest son is home from college.  He had a pile of folded pants on the floor of his room. They all needed mending. My son is a skinny guy. He usually keeps his phone in his back pocket. The skinny jeans he wears look great on him but the lycra/denim mix isn't the longest wearing fabric on the planet. The parts of his pants that support the pocket usually fail from the weight of his phone. So, right after I returned home I started mending pants. This checked pair has been mended several times.  I have been adding a patch to the inside of the pants and grafting the two layers together with lots of stitching.  Luckily my son doesn't mind the contrasting bits of patch showing. I mended two pairs of the lavender and black checkerboard jeans. I also mended two pairs of jeans that I think I bought my son while he was still in middle school. When I think about it, the...