Catching up on a busy week

This has been a busy, busy week.

Sunday began with the lovely task of tying tzitzit with Benny and his family. We met outdoors because Benny's mom is a wise woman and didn't want to risk Benny possibly getting exposed to Covid a week before his bar-mitzvah and turning the celebration into a super-spreader event.

Before a client comes to pick up a project I am always a wreck worrying if they will be happy with the piece. Just because I am pleased with a tallit doesn't mean that my client or his parents will be pleased. I expended some of my anxious energy setting up a table and chairs in my building's courtyard.

I wanted benny to see what the tallit looked like--normally I would drape the tallit on my dressmaking dummy.

Benny's father served as our model. Benny was really pleased. We sat down to tie the tzitzit. each family member
took a corner.

Benny was at first a little anxious if he could manage the knots. Benny's mom reminded him that he was familiar with the knots from lanyard making. Benny's father remembered his brief time as Boy Scout. It was just enough time spent in scouting to master the knots he needed for tzitzit tying.

Benny's mom had done enough camp crafts that the knots came easily to her.

As the family worked together they noticed details about the tallit that they hadn't noticed at first.

After the tzitzit were completed, Benny put on his tallit for the first time, reciting all of the blessings and intentional prayers and verses.

I'm not Benny's mother or his relative. I felt so proud of this sweet, deep-thinking young man.

His bar mitzvah is tomorrow. I am sure that he will be wonderful.

Later Sunday afternoon we went to Lincoln Center

to see

It was a fabulous production of an odd play.

I have been asked to make fifteen havdalah bags.

The photo above is from a batch I had made some time ago and are long gone. My usual method of transferring the text from paper to the silk was to lift the text from a photocopy, using shirt mending fabric ( that is cotton with a substrate of glue) and the heat of an iron to transfer the text to the glue and then iron the text to fabric. That method worked great for about twenty years until the chemical formula of photocopy toner changed. For a good long while, I used a different method where I soaked the fabric in a chemical, backed the fabric with a stiffener, and printed it with an inkjet printer. Alas, the chemical properties of ink jet ink have changed and that method no longer works. (AAARRRGGGHHH!)

I have through a whole bunch of trial and error this week come up with yet another method of image transfer onto fabric that seems to work. It involves a laser printer, the use of Chartex photo backing cloth (which alas is no longer being manufactured) and a spray fixative.

Below are some of the fifteen bags complete with text and pretty edging.

The bags have borders made out of midnight blue corded linen that has been in my stash for ages.

The text has been printed on either block-printed silk or linen. you can ignore the passive voice. I did the block printing.

I like when the bags evoke the time when you do havdalah.

Yes, all of the threads will be pulled to the back before the presentation.

If you were my mother I would show you every one of the bags.

The dedication on the back is also similarly framed with embroidered ribbon.

I like how each one will be unique.

Tonight we are eating vaguely Middle Eastern kibbe made with a mixture of ground chicken and beef. I hate touching ground chicken. It is slimy stuff. I had though that this mixture ( that I had purchased pre-Pesach in Brooklyn) would feel more like beef ---alas I was wrong. I have no problem working with raw chicken. The feel of ground chicken though is something else. I was making ugly faces the whole time I was making the kibbe. The kibbe do taste good and will be lovely with a green salad and challah.

This week I have jury duty which is why I am doing my best to get all of my work done.

Shabbat Shalom!

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

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...

sarah in nyc

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