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.

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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