sarah in nyc

 Today I started the part of the memory quilt that terrified me the most. While the quilt has been commissioned by the new baby's aunt it is really at its heart from the baby's grandmother who is no longer alive. In designing this quilt with the baby's aunt I felt strongly that the quilt should say that it was from the grandmother. My client agreed. This grandmother, being the thoughtful woman she was, came up with a special grandma moniker for herself. It was Shemama.  I had asked my client to see if she had a card or letter that was signed that way. Unfortunately, she did not. My client did the next best thing and cut and pasted letters written by her mother to get the message we wanted. My next task was to get those letters onto the quilt. There are many ways to do this task. I chose to use an old-fashioned method. First I printed out the image. Then I cut a piece of cotton batiste to the right size.  I taped the image to my window, taped the white cotton to the image,...

  It's Friday but I am not going to post about food. The photo above appeared in my Facebook feed today and it unleashed a torrent of memories. This photo is of the opening day of The Bargain Center in 1937.  Even people who have never been to Boston know about the wonders of  Filene's Basement, no, not the one that appeared in malls during the 1990's but the original Basement in the basement of Filene's on Washington Street in Boston. The Bargain Center was the Quincy version of excellent bargain hunting. You just never knew what you might find there. New England was a manufacturing center and the Bargain Center scoured the factories to buy unsold products.  My father often used to stop by after his morning swim at the YMCA a couple of blocks away. Once my father brought home a beautiful hand-beaded evening bag for my mother.  similar to this one. It was exactly right for my mother. It was classic, elegant, and not too flashy. It was classic enough that she use...

 I have been working away on the baby quilt. here you see the three "bookshelves" each arranged with toys and books made out of fabrics that had belonged to the new baby's recently deceased grandmother. My lovely client helpfully sent me a file filled with photos of toys and books that really mattered to my client and to her brother in their childhood so this quilt wouldn't be filled with images of generic childhood toys and books but with toys and books that truly mattered to them. As I have worked I have gone back to the list again and again.  Creating  this book cover was so time-consuming that I wasn't dying to attempt another detailed book cover. As I consulted the picture file one more time I realized that I had not yet tackled the Lionel trains. My client and her brother had spent lots of time with their father's Lionel trains.   I had kind of assumed that I could simply create a stylized traintrack, like this Clearly, I did not grow up with Lionel trai...

 Today has felt a little bit like a day out of a sitcom. I had kind of planned on having a quiet day at home to cook for Shabbat and to do some sewing and the doorbell kept ringing and friends kept dropping by--and I attended the online brit-milah of a baby born to someone I met as a toddler. The challah  got baked ( please ignore the passive voice), the chicken got cooked in these spices. There is also rice cooked with dried mushrooms that looks like rice cooked with dried mushrooms--use your imagination. My friend Janet came by with some wonderful old Arab embroideries that were purchased in Israel in the late 1960s. Janet and I are trying to come up with a way to use these embroideries in something that she will use. The quality of the workmanship is really good. We still haven't come up with a good idea of how to incorporate these into something that Janet will use and not just keep in a drawer. If you have any ideas please share. One of the items that came out of Janet's ...

 Ezra is having his bar-mitzvah on Shabbat B'reishit, the Shabbat when we read the story of creation. After a whole lot of discussion, some of it on Zoom and some in real life we decided that his tallit would be made up of seven stripes (on each side), each stripe representing a day of creation. Because Judaism has a less than comfortable relationship with imagery we decided that the depictions of what is created each day should skew towards the abstract. I haven't yet made the first day of creation but  I have it designed, at least in my mind. Day one of creation, in case you forgot is the separation of light from the darkness. I had made the stripes for day two of creation, the separation of the waters above and below the firmament or horizon.  It was time to tackle some of the other days. In my usual manner, I am not creating these strips in biblical order but in the order that strikes my fancy. I began work on day five, the day that the creatures of the water and thos...