A Surprise Hung on My Doorknob

I am making progress on Liat's tallit.

Each dyed strip needs to be edged with the dark teal ribbon before being attached to the body of the tallit.

I am really happy with the progress although I have had to do a fair amount of un-stitching along the way.

Either I have gotten better at the less than pleasant job of undoing rows of machine embroidery or have achieved a new state of Zen but I haven't cursed once when I have had to undo dense machine embroidery.

Yesterday we took the train to have lunch with my husband's friend since second grade. Aside from the lovely time we had and the excellent lunch we ate I also got to take these photos of the fabulous light fixtures at

Grand Central Terminal.

Today I opened my front door and found a bag attached to the doorknob. Inside was a treasure trove, from my friend Pearl. Pearl's adventurous mother had traveled the world before she decided to get married. Pearl's mother was an accomplished needlewoman ( she knit the beautiful suits she wore to elegant family events). Her husband was in the children's trimming business.

Pearl's mother died a few years ago. Pearl had given me bags of beautiful linens and notions and trimmings from her mother's massive stash. Today Pearl gave me another batch of treasures.

Of course, I will share the goodies with you.

This plastic bag contains

hundreds of lace birds.

I had never known that such a trim even existed. As soon as I saw them I began imagining a dark linen sheath with flocks of these birds flying up and down the front of the dress.

Perhaps my great-nieces will soon own dresses decorated with these birds.

I grew up with cruder versions of this trim made with yarn rather than fine thread.

Here is a sewing machine bobbin to give you a sense of scale so you can see how fine this lace is.

There was about a yard and a half of this beautiful embroidered net in the bundle of goodies.

Below are some closeups of this beautiful piece.

There were larger and smaller lengths of crochet edging.

Isn't this little topper beautiful?

And now, the closeups...

I have no idea where it was made. It could have been made any time from the 1930s until today.

I have an 18-inch length of this crochet lace from scalloped selvedge to scalloped selvedge.

I can sort of date these two doilies. I know that they were made before 1954.

I think that these two spectacular doilies were actually used.

They have turned brown, but I can restore them to white really easily and will start the process tonight.

It's beautiful work.

They are the sort of item you might have given as a hostess gift to someone you wanted to impress. The doily might have sat on a pretty wooden table with a beautiful bowl or a lamp carefully placed in the center. It was a shorthand way of broadcasting that you were an elegant woman of refined taste.

Today's treasure haul had one more doily of equal elegance to the two others.

Pearl also gave me a couple of yards of wide embroidered net edging.

Last of all is a roll of embroidered ribbon,

The colors are the full glory of mid-century fabulousness.

Although I didn't own a trapeze dress in lime green or pink kettle cloth with a strip of this ribbon marking the center front of the dress and encircling the hem of the dress I am sure that there were others my age who did.

As I typed those lines the image of the patterned white tights I would have worn with the dress dance in my head.

I look at this ribbon and a world populated with Pappagallo shod women appears in my head.

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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