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.