Why it takes me a while to get a job done

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 trains (always a small regret of mine) but Lionel trains look like this.

They are three metal tubes connected by a black bracket.

The engine my client included in the file was black. I have been creating everything on the quilt out of fabrics that had belonged to the woman who was being remembered in this quilt. ( Well, except for Felix the Cat )

I kept looking and looking at images of Lionel trains and tracks. I finally realized that I could construct a Lionel train track out of silver metallic cord and black ribbon for the ties.

Luckily, my striped denim tablecloth was on the kitchen table. I used the stripes as my folding guide for the ribbon.

I had two different spools of silver cord. Each was too narrow on its own but combined they were wide enough to make one of the metal tubes that make up the track.

Next, I had to make train cars. I spent more time visiting the Lionel train website. After a fair amount of obsessing I made a caboose out of a piece of a pillow cover.

Clearly, this piece of upholstery had meaning for my client and I hadn't used very much of it. I satin stitched the windows using both black and metallic bronze thread so it would look like sun glinting off of the windows. I embroidered 2021, the year of the baby's birth where one would expect the car number to be. If you noticed that the rivets in the center of the train wheels are stitched in gold congratulate yourself on your excellent vision.

I had one more train car to make. I finally decided on a hopper car.

it is made out of one of grandma's t-shirts and is filled with scraps of Imari printed cotton. I am very fond of my fabric. My sister-in-law made a tablecloth out of this exact fabric in the early 1980s and I associate this fabric with her gracious home.

I was finally ready to piece all of the strips together.

This is the center of the quilt. The composition makes sense. All that is left to do is the border, the backing, assembling all three layers of the quilt, and making a binding. The hard work is behind me.

When my client and I were discussing this quilt I asked her if she wanted a relatively flat quilt batting or a fluffy one. She wanted a fluffy quilt. These days the style in the world of quilts is flat batting. I purchased a batting online and it was thin. I chose to quilt each strip to the batting and then order a fatter batting to beef up the fluff factor---so the quilt will have not one but two layers of batting.

One of the advantages of this double batt method is that I could play with the quilting design as I did here quilting waves onto the bottom of Noah's ark.

There are a few more small details that I will add before I start on the borders

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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