Deceptively easy, deceptively hard

One of things that strikes me is that people who don't sew sometimes thing that relatively easy tasks are super complicated. At the same time exactly because they don't sew some things that seem easy on paper become a total headache when you actually have to do them.

So in the harder than it looks category is sewing this particular atara onto the tallit.

What has made it so hard is that there is a DIFFERENT atara on the other side of the tallit. And of course, the other atara is smaller and narrower. All of which means that I needed to sew the atara on so the stitching is invisible on both sides.

I won't take you through every bit of the process, but I will say that it took three frustrating attempts and several days to get right.

(Normally this is a job that would take maybe twenty minutes.)

Now for the other category, something that looks complicated, but is in fact a simple job. When I wear garments like this one

people will inevitably comment, "There is no way you made THAT!" Well, not only did I make this skirt, it's a pretty easy job, something you could do with an elementary school kid if they so desired.

I have been lucky enough to be able to buy yards and yards of really nice lace like this lovely corded black lace with two scalloped borders for a couple of bucks a yard.

I only had one yard of this particular lace in my stash and after dealing with the frustrating atara attachment job I wanted something easy to do. I decided to make a skirt.

This lace came with a bit of netting and an ugly selvedge extending beyond the scallops.

Just trim the extra stuff off. It will take several minutes. You can use either small embroidery scissors or just regular old sewing shears.

Then cut the yardage or in this case, the yard in half.

This particular length of fabric wasn't cut exactly straight by the store that sold me the fabric. So after a bit of struggle I realized that if I aligned the scallops from the right and left side I could figure out where the center line was and cut at the midpoint without breaking my brain.

If I were a child with no hips, belly ,or butt, I would then sew up the side seams. But since I have all three and don't want to look like a dump truck in my skirt I narrowed the volume of the skirt and the hips and waist. That sounds complicated until you look at my sketch below. The width of the waist is less than double my waist measurement, say 150% of my waist measurement. You can choose to make the waist either fuller or less full.

You can cut all four layers of skirt together --the front and the back of the skirt each folded in half or cut the front and the back separately.

I sewed together the side seams being sure to align the scallops at the bottom of the skirt and not worrying a whole lot about how even the waistband is-- because I trimmed the waistband after I sewed the side seams up.

I then needed to make the lining. This sounds like something hard. It isn't. It is a tube of fabric narrower than the outer skirt and just a bit shorter.

Cut the lining so the waistlines are the same size. It makes life easier.

Then sew the two waistbands together, the skirt waistband and the lining waistband.

Flip the lining to the inside of the skirt.

There are dozens of ways to insert an elastic. This is what I did here. I sewed a length of elastic to my waist size. I slipped the elastic circle between the lining and the lace right hear the waistband seam and sewed just below the elastic.

The method requires a whole bunch of shifting of your hands and the elastic around as you work. If you prefer you can make a casing-- that is stitch a row of straight stitching about 1/2 inch below the waistband seam and then cut a tiny hole so you can thread in a safety pin holding a long elastic tail. Then thread the elastic through the casing and then tie off the elastic.

Turn your skirt so the lining is on the inside. I found that the skirt looks better on me if I move the gathers to the back.

My total investment in terms of materials was about $2.50, $2.00 for the lace and about .50 for the lining and the elastic. My investment in time was about 30 minutes.

It took more time to write out the directions than to make it.

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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