sarah in nyc

Sometimes when people compliment my work they will tell me that I am so talented. That compliment always kind of annoys me. If you had seen my drawings from childhood or my early craft attempts in elementary school you might have kindly pulled me aside and suggested that I might  do better to spend my time and energies on something else. I have seen children pick up a crochet hook and very quickly learn how to crochet something. ( I am the mother of such a child) I was not that child. It took me ten years to figure out how to crochet. It took me ten years to figure out how to knit even though I had a patient sister and patient friends who sat down with me and tried to show me in many different ways how to hold my hands and how to hold the yarn. What I have learned after decades of trying and failing, is that for me to learn I need to first do a task every which way of wrong before my brain slowly starts to sort out the engineering of the task at hand. The other thing I have c...

There has been a bunch on my plate, some of it work for clients and some of it that falls into that category of other. In the other category, I just completed this sweater for our Santa Barbara great niece. I bought the green yarn at Santa Barbara's best thrift store when we visited last summer. A fancy yarn store had gone out of business and had donated gorgeous yarns to the thrift store. The beautiful carved shell flower hook closure comes from the stash of my friend Pearl's mother.  Pearl's mother was a really excellent knitter. She knit herself beautiful suits that she wore to each of her grandchildren's bar-mitzvahs. I have a small leather change purse from her stuffed with wonderfully carves shell buttons. This closure would be great even if it were made out of plastic but out of carved shell, well, you just can't get any better. I used the flower embroidered ribbon to give the clasps a firm footing. They also do a good job of jazzing up th...

Everything beautiful like these challot (braided by my youngest) often gets it's start as less beautiful.  For example, these challot earlier today, looked like this and after a few hours like this. Tonight's dessert, peach and yogurt swirl ice-cream with chunks of white chocolate  began like this  and this As it is with food, so it is with my work. I am working on an atara. it has one of my favorite verses for a tallit it comes from the book of Jonah. בְּהִתְעַטֵּ֤ף עָלַי֙ נַפְשִׁ֔י אֶת־יְהוָ֖ה זָכָ֑רְתִּי וַתָּב֤וֹא אֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ תְּפִלָּתִ֔י אֶל־הֵיכַ֖ל קָדְשֶֽׁךָ׃ When my life was ebbing away, I called the LORD to mind; And my prayer came before You, Into Your holy Temple. In Hebrew the first word of the verse is also the verb we use to describe being wrapped in a tallit.  If you read it with that meaning in your head, " In the wrapping up of my soul with God." You can see what a perfect verse it is for a tallit. ...

Usually when I do a project it is a collaboration between me and my client.  These two atarot are a collaboration between my client, my sister (who did the calligraphy) and me. This is the atara for the bat mitzvah girl. Below is the atara for her mother. I didn't want the two to be identical despite being made using the same fabric and the same paint colors. I want to show you how I built up the decorative stitching at the ends of the atara. First I stitched rays in straight stitch using gold metallic thread. I thought the diamond shaped stitching would add the right amount of punch. I use a thin bronze colored thread. It is meant to be used in sweater knitting to add a bit of elegant sheen. The thread was not made to run through a sewing machine. If you aren't used to the thread it breaks often and causes the user to do a great deal of cursing.  After so many years ( I have a giant cone of this thread) I have terrorized the thread into...