Adjusting to the new not quite normal

Our sons are both working from home. They are fortunate to both be employed.

The Max's bar-mitzvah has been postponed until fall so I stopped working on his tallit.

I had done a bunch of work with a client on her tallit for her wedding in mid-May. I assume that that wedding has also been put off for a while.

I had one piece that was on the to do later pile.

In the mid 1970's Navah needle-pointed a tallit bag for her husband. She was working on the project while she was working at Camp Ramah and she asked one of the members of the arts and crafts staff to draft the lettering for her husband's name. When Navah's son became bar-mitzvah Navah used the same design for her son's tallit bag and I can't recall who she had draft the letters.

For the past several years Navah and I have gotten together so I could draft the letters for the tallit bags for each of her grandchildren. A while ago I drafted the letters for Ziv Pela, the very last grandchild.

A few weeks ago Navah brought over the completed bit of needle-point so I could construct it into a bag. I pulled Navah's work out yesterday.

It's really hard to create curves in needle-point. It's a system of work that is completely tied to a grid. If you do make a curve it tends to look like an overly pixelated illustration. The letters look a little bit blobby and not as attractive as they might.

I pulled out some fine gold metallic thread and chain stitched a fine line around all of the letters in Ziv Pela's name. in the photo above I had already completed the aleph, the letter all the way to the left. i think you can see that it has been improved.

I did check with Navah and she gave me her permission to outline the rest of the letters.

You can barely see my embroidery but it vastly improved how the letters look.

Most of my sewing work over the past several days has been making fabric face masks.

I have been using up fabrics that have been,(as my sewing friends say), ripening in my stash.

The staff in my building all got masks.

My physician friend asked me for one. her hospital is desperatly low on face masks for their staff. I gave her the two pictured above.

My youngest has two. the fabric on the face of this mask was purchased in Tel Aviv. it is covered with verses from the Song of Songs.

My total face mask tally is something over thirty at this point.

The yellow floral print came from my cousin's 1970's kitchen renovation. She is moving out of her house and gave me a bit of the left over cotton.

The fabric on my husband's mask was purchased for my by my nephew when he was in the Ivory Coast. I made myself a dress out of the rest of the fabric.

I haven't been outside since Sunday. Broadway looked pretty deserted during my late morning workout.

In the late afternoon a family walked home from the local market.

The internet grocer must be doing bang up business. There is so little traffic that this delivery man is comfortable pushing his dolly full of empty delivery cases up the middle of Broadway. Normally that would be suicidal.

I had a long video chat with my childhood friend in Israel.

Rachely has been taking beautiful nature photos for the past couple of years. She too is essentially is on lock down just as we are here in New York. She spoke about how hard it is for her to not be out in nature finding wonderful images to take. We both spoke about trying to find that from our much more limited window views of nature.

I thought of Rachely as I took these photos.

I accidentally made a really ugly dinner.

It actually tasted good despite like looking like food from a terrible Victorian orphanage. I am stunned by how awesomely bleak this plate looks.

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...

sarah in nyc

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