The Fourth of Elul

Today is my father's fourteenth Yahrziet. Last night I attended a Shiva minyan and recited Kaddish.

This morning I put up a batch of challah.

We will be spending the weekend with dear friends so I am baking challah for my hostess. As I did all of the familiar tasks that make up making a batch of challah I thought about how my father used to bake challah. I thought about our very different approaches to the task. My father was much more methodical. Once he figured out a formula for challah baking he stuck to it with no variations.

My father had difficulty braiding the dough so he baked his challot in a loaf pan. Each pan held five quarter pound lumps of dough. My father made up a much bigger batch of dough at a time than I do making at least a dozen loaves at a time.

Despite the differences in our challah baking styles and probably in our approaches to life---doing this act today, of all days connected me to my father.

Today I ran into our rabbi and found out that I will be once again blowing shofar.

I began my practice today doing a round of of shofar blowing with the tough to blow tan shofar and then another round with the much easier to blow black shofar.

Aside from bread baking and shofar blowing this has been a nose to the grindstone time for me. I have four pieces that are all due the same day. I have already written about the two tallitot.

I am in the home stretch of work on the two wall hangings.

I am ready to show details of the two wall hangings but I am not quite ready to do a deep dive into their creation.

I will say that there has been a great deal of covering buttons in fabric as well as a great deal of hand quilting.

Covering buttons is one of those skills that are usually outlined in the front of an old fashioned sewing book. In case you don't have an old sewing book or two or a dozen on your shelf, this is how you cover buttons in fabric.

You cut a circle of fabric just larger than the button. It is optional to add a bit of scrap fabric as a bit of padding.

Then you put the fabric fluff under the button --if you want a padded button.

You sew a row of gathering stitches near the edge of the circle, capturing the fluff and the button inside.

Stitch the bundle together and if you are feeling fancy you can also make a thread shank.

Here is the completed button.

And here it is sewn into place.

I have made many buttons in various sizes for these pieces.

And now an entry to be filed under weird.

I was skimming the Wall Street Journal the other day and say my mother in law's face looking out of the paper.

It actually isn't my mother in law but a sculptor who looks amazingly like her. My husband noted that the sculptor even had the same haircut as my mother in law. I don't think that my father in law was the sculptor's barber though.

It's late and it is time to clean up all of the teeny scraps of fabric that are carpeting my dining room.

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

Search This Blog