Dear Friends and Serendipity

My grandparents didn't know their exact birthdays. My grandfather knew that he was born in the year of the "groisse shturm", or 1888. As we keep living through the pandemic my own sense of time has gotten a little wobbly. My feisty friend Yocheved died early in the last crop of deaths that claimed five friends in about four weeks.

Yocheved's nieces now have the awesomely difficult job of emptying out Yocheved's apartment which was filled with books and more books, giant African sculptures, pottery from the Middle East, Judaica, books, textiles, tons of needlework made by Yocheved and books.

Earlier this week I had lunch with my dear friend Esther. We usually end our visits with a look around the thrift store. While I was waiting to pay for my purchase, there was Yocheved's niece Martha asking after her lost glasses. I greeted Martha and she asked if I wanted to choose things to take from Yocheved's apartment. Yocheved's wish was that anything that hadn't been promised to family and dearest friends should be just given to the people who loved Yocheved.

A little while later my husband and I walked into the familiar apartment. Another niece, Laura was there working on packing things up. She asked me if there was anything I would be interested in and of course, I answered textiles. Laura said that she wanted to show me something. She said, " I love this and I'm not giving this to you but I want you to see it." She handed me the tallit bag that I was commissioned to make Yocheved for I think her 70th birthday.

Laura had no idea that I had made it. Yocheved was 95 when she died and the bag has had hard wear.

The silk lining has shredded. I asked if I could take the bag home and repair it using some of the textiles that Yocheved collected.

The tallit bag was a gift from a group of friends. It was a surprise for Yocheved. I had known Yocheved long enough to know exactly the colors and the look for the bag I made for her.

You can see the bag nestled among some of Yocheved's textiles. The needlepoint was made by Yocheved.

The red piece at the bottom of the photo is the bodice of an Arab dress. The greenish piece in the center was probably once black but the dyes were unstable. I plan to reinforce the bag with pieces of this work.

A closeup of the greenish piece.

I love the color combinations on this piece. The base of the embroidery is made up of two layers. A loosely woven even-weave cotton serves as the lop layer, easy for counting to establish the pattern.

You can see that it is backed with a sturdier plaid woven cotton.

Here is the dress bodice.

I took close-ups so you can see how the embroidery was done.

It is a tightly packed cross stitch. Usually, a main line of the design is counted off and stitched then the details are added in.

I believe that the white twisted couched work is wool.

When I went to Israel in 1970 one commonly saw Arab women wearing dresses embellished with this kind of embroidery Although traditional Arab women in Israel still wear long dresses, these days they are more commonly made out of synthetic knits in dark colors.

When I made the bag it expressed something about my friend Yocheved. Now that Yocheved is no longer alive I hope to repair the bag so Laura can carry memories of her beloved aunt with her for many years as she used this tallit bag.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog