sarah in nyc

Thanksgiving always falls on a Thursday. Shabbat always begins on Friday. For many Jewish families this means two nights of giant dinners in a row, just like on all major Jewish holidays. We were fortunate to have been invited to the home of my childhood friend. Her grandmother was such a good cook that decades after my father had left Halifax he would sigh with great satisfaction and longing remembering one or another of the dishes she used to cook. My friend learned well from her grandmother.  Additionally, my friend was one of those girls who grew up reading cookbooks obsessively thinking about flavor and technique. When I received the email inviting us for Thanksgiving my kids shouted with joy.  It was a beautiful meal that was so good I ate each bite slowly because each element of the meal, the brisket, the turkey, the Brussels sprouts were each a distilled essence of what that food was. The meal was served on my friend's grandmother's dishes.  Elegant, delicio...

At long last, the tallit is complete. I had made a beautiful atara (neckband), only to realize that it was just too wide for the narrow tallit. My husband wisely suggested that I use it as the decorative element on the bag. My dear friend Welmoed had given me a length of red silk curtain from her drapery workshop a few years ago. It was the perfect color for the bag. The lovely work Welmoed had done to line and interline the curtain provided exactly the right amount of structure for the bag. I lined the bag with red linen and calligraphed the bat-mitzvah girl's name  in Hebrew and English- here scribbled out for her privacy. Below you see the tallit inside the bag. I made a new atara. Below you see the mitered corners of the embroidered ribbon. Mitering used to be a task I did really badly. I love how the machine embroidery evokes the look of of old hand embroidery from any number of cultures. You can see what the ribbon looked like before I embro...

A little while back our buddy Allan sent me an email titled " Alte zachen ", old clothes. Allan is a mucky muck on the staff of Hebrew College in Boston. I don't exactly remember his title  but he is a wonderful teacher of texts and also of the complicated work of how one is a rabbi in a community. All Jewish institutions become the recipients of old Jewish stuff from dead Jews ( to put it crudely). Someone dies and their the work of closing out a house is overwhelming. There is always tons of stuff that the descendants won't want but clearly should not be thrown away. Old prayer books, ancient Hebrew or Yiddish primers, songsters from the early years of the twentieth century, rayon tallitot that were worn once at a 1930's bar-mitzvah still in the original box, souvenirs from long ago trips to Israel, and Jewish art of varying quality all end up on the doorstep of Jewish institutions. These challah covers arrived at Hebrew College in a box of old Jewish books....

Last Friday we drove to the wedding.  We spent Shabbat with dear, dear friends. My older sister hosted a Friday night dinner for some of us out-of- towners. We attended the auf-ruf on Shabbat morning and had the pleasure of hearing my nephew read Torah and the Haftarah. As we walked back and forth through Newton each street name was full of memories. I never lived in Newton but many of my classmates did. Grant Street, Hobart Road, Langley Road, Cotton Street, Park Lane Street, Ballard Street, each street name evoked a person, a relationship, parties invited to, parties not invited to..... Sunday morning friends and family gathered for the wedding. Friends, readers of this blog as well as my sewing buddies have asked me to show photos of me in my dress.  My cousin Eunice who often serves as the family documentarian took these photos of me at the beginning of the festivities. We (that means my husband at the wheel) drove home after the wedding and than...

Creating a piece for a client is always about balancing  various sets of needs. Often my client is a twelve year old kid with their own strong opinions. Sometimes the parents have strong opinions. Clearly,  (and anyone who knows me for more than five minutes can tell you) I am a person with opinions on things, particularly Jewish ritual objects. This has been especially true in the making of Alice's tallit. A big part of my job has been taking what she has felt strongly about and making it work in the context of a tallit. Alice loves orange and red. neither would be my first, or even tenth choice on a tallit. Never the less, it is important that she be heard. There are lots of tallit makers that combine lovely ready made ribbon to make a tallit. I use a mix of embroidery stitches and utility stitches ( the sorts of stitches you might use to mend torn trousers or to install elastic into a pair of underpants) to embellish the ribbon and the stripes into a composition...