...and now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

I am aware that despite the name of this blog, I haven't been writing about sewing all that often in the past while. This post, at least goes back to the subject.

Summer dresses tend to have a shorter life span than dresses worn during the cooler months. Hot weather fabrics tend to be a bit less sturdy. sweat is also corrosive to fabrics. The result is that summer dresses live a hard and fast life.

The weather had been almost freakishly cold this spring so I could keep wearing cool weather dresses. over the past few days as I went to my closet to choose something to wear, my options seemed more and more limited.

I had made this dress several weeks ago,

from a stretch suiting. I had purchased this fabric for my youngest who loves black and white checkerboard. It was too much of a variation on checkerboard to make him happy and not the real thing.

This dress was fast to make up and I like wearing it. It is, however, better suited for those cold New England springs when you want to wear something bright but it is too cool to wear spring clothes.

I purchased this fabric from Kashi at Metro Textiles back in the old days when you could wander into a fabric store and touch bolts of fabric and muse about what you would make with the fabric. I loved this fabric so much that I bought in on three different occasions in three different colors. I have already turned the red and the teal versions of this fabric into dresses I wear all the time. It's a light weight rayon knit with a cool texture heat pressed into the fabric. Without the texture, it's a perfectly OK fine stripe. The texture just bumps the fabric up a notch .

It's now this dress that you will probably see me wearing often.

While inspecting the content of my closet I came across a dress that I don't wear often because it isn't particularly flattering on me these days. I wore it a few days ago and while wearing it, I realized that it would look a whole lot better if it were darted.

Now this dress is back into rotation.

I also got going on some client work.

Max's bar-mitzvah was supposed to be in mid-May. It has been rescheduled for the fall.

One of the hardest tasks is figuring how to transfer lettering for fabric to be embroidered. I have done this in any number of ways over the years. I decided this time to use an old technique. I calligraphed the letters onto a piece of old cotton. (This is not any old piece of cotton this is a sheet my husband bought during his Paris year. It holds a great deal of sentimental value to him which is why it is not just in the rag bag.)

You then baste the strip of cotton onto the fabric that needs to be embroidered.

Then you begin to embroider the lettering.

I am doing a satin stitch over a row of stitching. The first set of stitching is there to give the satin stitching a bit of padding and look more luxurious.

After all of the embroidery is done I will pull away all of the cotton thread by thread. The embroidery will be all that is visible. I have seen descriptions of this method since I was a little kid but I have not actually done it before. I hope I won't be cursing too much when it comes to pulling away each thread of the cotton sheet.

Today I also took some time to make a birthday gift for a friend. The fabric was from a purchase of samples of high end home dec fabrics at my local thrift store. I just thought that this was gorgeous fabric. It's linen mixed with I don't know what. The weave reminds me of Anni Albers.

You can see more of here work here https://albersfoundation.org/art/anni-albers/weavings/index/.

I added a tiny bit of embroidery. This just felt very right for my friend who understands the world through the small details.

It feels good to get things accomplished.

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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