Wading through the marsh of Covid

I did a little bit of retail therapy to get me through feeling so dragged out by Covid. I bought myself

a batch of old sewing magazines. The ones above are from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I also bought some copies of Needlecraft magazine, a Maine-based magazine that was published from the very early days of the 20th century until I think the 1930s. Forgive my tiny Covid brain but it wasn't until I looked at the photos that both the old and the newer magazine have the same title.

I have several issues of this magazine which seemed to have had kind of an interesting business model. In addition to featuring ads from various advertisers,

they also had their readers sell subscriptions to the magazine for all sorts of fabulous premiums.

Probably a third of the ad space is taken up with ads for the various premiums you can get for selling subscriptions of the magazine.

I am enough of a consumer goods nerd to take great joy in reading all of the possible premiums available to some eager woman who sells lots of subscriptions.

Each issue of the magazine has articles on food and cooking, home dec, as well as

ideas for embroidering linens. I have several pieces in my collection of linens embroidered with this bow and garland motif.

I often learn surprising things by reading Needlecraft magazine. One of the first issues I had purchased had an article about tie-dye.

I never would have expected to see spray painting mentioned in the 1920s.

So many women learned how to make pretty edgings for their household linens or their clothing from these magazines.

I haven't gone through this batch of Needlecraft magazines that carefully but I will share any particular treasures I find as I read during my convalescence.

I leafed through one issue of the 1970's Needlecraft magazines. I don't know if there was a relationship between the older and newer magazines with the same name.

As I looked at the ads I felt like I was gone into the home of a childhood friend.

I must have seen this ad for the daisy afghan maker a hundred times, or the ad for its cousin.

I was the kind of kid who read every word of ad copy in every single ad in every publication that came into our house.

Seeing these ads from my childhood is pretty wonderful.

Aside from the fact that being sick with Covid just isn't fun, one of the really unfortunate things about getting Covid is that I had to cancel my appointment for tomorrow to get new hearing aids. If it weren't for Covid I would have replaced my aging pair two years ago. They are now the hearing aid equivalent of glasses held together with packing tape and wire.

I had set up tomorrow's appointment early in October. Tomorrow was the first possible opening. Actually, I was lucky because my initial appointment was for mid-February but someone canceled so I got moved up.

I called to cancel this appointment as soon as I tested positive and left a message on their voicemail asking to help me reschedule. Today I got a call back from the scheduler. She mentioned that today was her first day back at work after her own bout with Covid. she mentioned that her life partner died at the beginning of the pandemic and her father and a cousin died a few weeks later. The appointment scheduler and I both wept together on the phone.

She put me on the cancellation list.

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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