A visit to the garment district and a request from my sewing readers

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 the two nice men who used to run Chic Fabric ensconced in a new store. Ann found one of her navy knits and a really beautiful navy guipure lace off-cut for a nearly silly price of $8 per yard. She left the store happy but still dreaming of the embroidered mesh.

A few stores later, she found exactly the fabric she had been dreaming of.
It was a gulp-inducing price but far less than what Ann had seen quoted on the internet. After some thinking, Ann bit the bullet and bought the fabric.

We then went to visit our friend Kashi at Metro Textiles. Kashi is Iranian and Jewish and escaped to New York in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Kashi is well known to readers of Pattern Review. Kashi stocks his store with a wide range of high-quality fabrics at really wonderful prices. Until recently if you wanted to shop from him you could do it either in person or by phone. Now Kashi has a website Metro Textiles.

The fabrics on the site are a tiny fraction of what he has in stock. I would suggest that you be in touch with Kashi if you don't see exactly what you want. I do want to add that I am not getting a kick-back from Kashi. I know that he will treat you as nicely as he has treated me over the years. So my request is that you shop from Kashi if you are looking for a fabric and don't find it in your local shop.

I did buy some fabrics from him today because I simply could not resist. This is a terrible picture of a textured striped rayon knit with a slight stripe. The color is a deeper brickier color.

This sweater knit is deliciously soft and drapes like a dream. Often boucle knits are nasty to the touch. This is from an Italian mill it also comes in a brown.

This flame stitched knit has a nice drape and a nice sheen.

It is just different enough on the face and back of the fabric to create some nice design opportunities.

Kashi also had a less expensive version of the fabric my friend Ann had purchased earlier in the day. It's wasn't as finely embroidered as Ann's but as long as we don't stand next to one another while we wear our garments, no one would know that I was wearing the knock-off

version of Ann's.

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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