A sweater, sky and a white atara

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 this sweater. Several friends have seen this sweater while it was being made. Most of them laugh at the sheer silliness of the sweater. It is just slightly daft-- but I am a strong believer in dressing children in clothing that makes their mother laugh. Living with babies is hard. It can be exhausting. A garment that reminds you of why you chose to be the mother of a baby is a pretty good thing.

This was a week of crazy skies.

This was taken in the parking lot of a New Jersey Costco just before a downpour.

Last night we were coming back to Manhattan over the George Washington bridge. It was overcast and the sun was setting. These two not very interesting buildings in Fort Lee were transformed by the light.

After we crossed to Manhattan I was able to catch these two images of the bridge.

They look like the kind of "art" that is sold at discount stores.

I wasn't as successful capturing the fiery sunset across the Hudson.

Today I delivered the two green atarot to the post office. it was noonish and the shadows were hard and bright.

After I got home and before I got to work on on the all white atara I took care of some house chores.

I re-filled out dish soap. I now have both blue and green blue dish soap on hand so I can do this

and make myself happy. My husband used to joke early in our relationship that I was a cheap date.

I am very easily amused.

After thinking about the all white atara all weekend you can read about it here I realized that I needed to re draft the letters larger. I also figured out a better way to mark the letters onto the piece.

I once again drafted the letters onto white silk gazar- it's sheer so you can see the lettering clearly from the reverse.

I then began ( I an not yet done) outline stitching the letters from the reverse.

I realized as I was working that this is an old timey way to get the job done.

I also felt a little sentimental because this was the first stitch my mother taught me how to embroider when I was seven years old.

To prevent suicide caused by sheer boredom I am outlining the letters in random order. I know it makes no sense to do it this way. I have family members that probably cringe when they see me attack the task this way, because it just seems so wrong. Doing all of this outlining is awfully boring. It has to get done. The letters won't complain.

I am aware that at the moment my lettering is less refined than normal. I can add all of the small refinements later. The point of this task is to put each letter in it's correct place more or less in the right shape.

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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