Saved from the jaws of failure

A couple of years ago, and you will have to forgive me because I can't exactly pinpoint when, I needed to make a dress for an event. As I type this I think it may have been for a wedding that took place a year or so before Covid.

I purchased a length of dark silver sequin on mesh fabric to make the dress. I no longer remember exactly what I paid for the fabric but it cost more than what I normally spend on fabric I had wanted the dress to have lots of movement so I cut the dress out on the bias. Stupidly, I hadn't purchased quite enough fabric so the dress was a bit short for my taste and my less than wonderful legs.

I thought that if I added a couple of inches of this puckery silver fabric to the hem then my too short of a dress problem would be solved.

The color of the puckered fabric looked terrible with the sequined fabric.

Laid flat the two fabrics actually don't look terrible together. Sewn together though the combination was awful

I had created a disaster. My sewing friends would call this dress a UFO, an un-finished object. I tossed the dress that made me feel terrible about myself, my ability to match colors and my ability to make dresses into my mountain of fabric stash. When i thought about the dress I would feel terrible all over again.

Yesterday, the dress jumped into my hand as I was looking for something else. I tried the dress on and it actually seemed closer to a wearable dress than it did to a disaster. I re sewed the shoulder seams. I unpicked the puckered silver hem extension.

Last week I made a neighbor a circular ruffle scarf out of a pair of pants that had belonged to her late mother. My neighbor's mother had tie dyed the pants. My neighbor had felt awful at the thought of tossing those pant or having them just given to charity. She had wanted SOMETHING to be made out of the pants. I made a cascading circular ruffle scarf. Forgive me, there are no photos of the completed scarf.

To make circular ruffles you cut a series of fabric donuts

and then cut from the outside of the circle to the inside. You then attach the cut ends together. Physics push the outer edges of the circle outward creating a bouncy looking ruffle.

Making that scarf was easy. It seemed like a good solution for the hem of the dress.

Here is the dress complete with the black circular ruffle at the hem. I completed the last fiddly bits of the dress between yesterday and today ( lining the dress, edging the armholes and cleaning up the errant threads).

The dress looks better with a belt.

I am writing about this dress mostly to give you courage when you are faced with something that seems like a disaster. Coming back to what had seemed like nothing like a complete failure and a waste of beautiful fabric just needed a second look and a bit more work.

I may be wearing this dress yet to another wedding this winter.

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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