Getting Back to Work

All of our Passover stuff got put away. All of our during the year stuff is back more or less in its place. This could not have been done without the gracious good spirited help of my kids. We had a slight blip when none of us could remember where we had put our dairy silverware. I was at that point so tired that I couldn't even remember what the silverware looked like. My husband found the giant tote bag. And if you were wondering what our dairy silverware looks like it is a mix of silverplate from as early as the 1920s and as recent as the 1950s.

Yesterday our older son baked our first loaf of bread.

While I really hadn't missed bread during Passover, eating my first slice of home-baked bread in a few weeks, I was reminded about what a truly wonderful thing bread is.

With the holiday over, it was time to get back to work.

I spent a long time yesterday typesetting text for an atara. My client wants a selection of prayers that are meaningful for him on the atara. I plan to print all of the prayers onto treated silk. Getting them all set up properly with appropriate typefaces sized and spaced properly is persnickety work. I currently have all of the text set up, but in the incorrect order and with some funky space issues but I have figured out the hardest piece of the job which was to get the computer to lay out what I have envisioned. So I would say I am more than halfway done with the computer piece of THAT job.

Technology has come in handy with my next job. I have been asked to make a pillowcase to be used at a brit milah. One thing technology has done is to let the parents know what gender baby they are having. Technology has also come into play in my work with the client. This piece has been designed with my clients entirely by text message. This for me is a first.

We decided on this text

which comes from the brit milah ceremony. While this text was in my prayerbook, it was not available online so I copied it out for my client and took a photo which I sent to her. It asks that this child have a heart wide open to the learning of Torah and that he want to learn and to teach and to keep the mitzvot. It further asks that this child have length of days and years, a life filled with fear of sin, a life filled with wealth and honor and a life in which the desires of his heart get fulfilled.

My client had shown me a piece with blessings set against a cosmic sky that she had loved so I could get an idea of what she was thinking about.

I sent this sketch.

There will be more heavenly bodies in the finished piece.

Today I began dyeing the cotton for the pillowcase. The dyes are still damp and they will be lighter when they dry.

In real life, the fabric reads as bluer than my camera can capture.

In a few more layers of dye this will look like the cosmos.

The other day I saw this sign which at times could serve as the front door to our apartment.

I am ending this post with one last photo from my walk in the park. Today was actually kind of cold and nasty but with the help of a bit of technology, we can pretend otherwise.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

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