Skip to main content

A Hodge Podge of tasks

 Today has been a rush of a variety of tasks.



I made a roast.

This is a shoulder roast.  I coated it in a variety of spices and cooked it until it smelled done.

I added boiling water to the pan drippings and then added other goodies ( fresh thyme, dried mushroom and good old Manishewitz wine that is a must for charoset and kind of useless as drinking wine). I carefully scraped up all of the dried up good stuff and turned the mixture into a gravy that will be served with the meat.

We are a bit container shy during Passover and there was a bit too much gravy to fit in the one container we had left , so I boiled red potatoes in water to which I added that last bit of gravy, the dried mushrooms and the thyme stems. 


Covid had meant that not very many people visited so I had allowed bits of our couch to get shabby. I had been meaning to replace the cover on the center cushion on our couch for the last long time. I pulled down a few of my upholstery fabrics and made a new cushion cover.

Yes, the cover is two sided


A friend had been napping on the couch please excuse the tangle of blankets. I love how all of the various prints and stripes all play so nicely together.  I am grateful that I had seen a beautiful ABC Carpet and Home couch upholstered in several different fabrics at our friend Bonnie's country house.  I love that I can replace the upholstery as it gets sad looking. Occasional time commitments of an hour or so keeps my couches from looking too shabby.


I also ironed a stack of linens but took photos only of this new to me tablecloth.


This is a great example of a late 19th -early 20th century home made linen tablecloth. The red embroidery was particularly beloved in Central Europe. 


 The machine sewn hems are a neither wide and generous nor are they tiny and fine. They are an in between not very elegant width.  A length of crochet lace was added to give the cloth a bit more elegance. 

These sorts of edgings were crochet by the mile and then added to whatever needed a pretty trim.






The stitching is large and fairly tidy.

This cloth will probably make an appearance during Passover.






Shabbat Shalom!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...