Crummy and Not-crummy

Much of this week could kind of be categorized into either crummy or not crummy.

In the crummy category,earlier this week I was feeling so sick that I spent a whole lot of time on the couch not able to do very much of anything.  I was however able to to catch some pretty dramatic cloud-scapes from my position on the couch.

On the crummy side of the ledger, my favorite teapot developed a fatal crack.

I am really fond of the pot because it matches the every-day dairy dishes of my youth. I had found the teapot in my local thrift store and it was priced more than i wanted to spend. The lid was cracked and repaired. A couple of weeks later it was marked down to $8.  I have repaired the lid a couple of times, but the tea pot gave me a great deal of joy every time i used it or even saw it on my counter. The bargain priced made the teapot especially dear to me.  I made myself a pot of tea  the other day because that's what one does when one is under the weather. What had looked like a tiny hairline fracture gave way and there was hot tea all over the counter.  I was sad.

Yesterday a large box marked "fragile" was delivered.

My husband found an un-cracked replacement for my beloved teapot. My husband claims that it is to celebrate the anniversary of our first meeting, Labor Day weekend in 1981 during the  celebrations of my cousin's wedding.  I am truly touched by the sentiment and by having an unblemished remembrance of my childhood back in my life.



Work on the atara and bag have been complicated---but completed. Here is the tallit complete with pinot and atara.

The bag too was complicated it it's own way. It was an institutional bag made out of a petty enough velvet and with a logo embroidered on the front. The manufacturer used a nasty interfacing to support the embroidery, it felt like cheap cardboard.

My client wanted a blue bag to go with this tallit. I thought that it made sense to re make  the not beautiful bag into a beautiful bag. My client wanted a sense of water. I thought I could cut away the logo and replace it with a framed depiction of water.

I thought to paint cotton velvet to look like water. Normally when you paint velvet you need to do it from the reverse. If you paint it from the front the lovely velvety nap gets permanently clumpy and both looks and feels awful.

I painted from the reverse.

I loved how it looked, but on the face of the fabric....

it wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

So I used the velvet wrong side out.

The "window'is framed with ribbon embroidered with waves.

The bag is lined with this pretty upholstery fabric.

 I am pretty pleased with the result.


Today chicken got cooked.

Potatoes got roasted

My older son made these marinated vegetables. ( I bossed, he followed my directions)

And continuing in this week's theme of making the best of a situation-- I turned garbage into dessert.

We have been saving  mandarin peels  in a plastic bag in the freezer.


I chopped them up and boiled them in water for about 20 minutes so they would loose their bitterness.

I drained them and then added 2 cups of sugar and four of water and let the mixture boil away

until it became thick and syrupy.

I kept boiling past the point that you see here, and eventually lay the contents of the pit on a baking sheet and let it continue to dry out in the downdraft of my oven.

 If my husband hadn't mentioned that he likes his candied orange peels dry rather than more marmalade-like, I would have called it a day. But it's nice to make things that my husband likes so I set the pan in a low oven to further dehydrate the orange peels.

So like the week, dessert is garbage transformed into something pretty wonderful.

Shabbat Shalom!