sarah in nyc

 This has been a week tinged by sadness. Those of you who are regular readers here may remember the posts tagged "Vivian treasures". Vivian was a member of our synagogue community. When I first moved to New York and became a part of the synagogue, the demographics of the synagogue were probably 80% exactly my husband's age, about a dozen years older than I was. Vivian was one of the first people I met who was roughly my age. Vivian was vivacious and funny. She loved accessories. She worked at the jewelry counter of a wonderful vintage store about ten blocks south . This was before her long career in the city's department of urban planning. Many of us in those days---who were in our 20s were someplace between being students and starting on our real lives. For many of us there were marriages, children and careers that took place between then and now. Vivian for a constellation of reasons stayed in that suspended space between adolescence and adulthood.  Vivian was in ma...

  Eight verses of Psalm 146 are now painted on one strip of wool for Alan's tallit. The letters will need another layer of paint and an outline to cute the lettering up a little bit. I will probably be painting this text out a few more times before this task is completed but it feels like a good start. I have discovered, that it is for some reason, easier to copy the text from my phone than from a book. I love this mix of high tech and low tech  to complete a task. As always I am the most efficient as a worker when I have several tasks on my plate at one time so I can hop from one task to another when I get stuck. Otherwise I can just wallow in my failures and not get anything done. So, the other task on my plate is the Schechter Mappah. Yesterday I finished edging the sky. Three rows of rat-tail cording have all be hand stitched into place. The other night, I realized something about this mappah. I realized that the Schechter school has been using this piece upside down for t...

 Yesterday my sister came to visit, partially to visit me but also to see    Alex's father was in my older sister's class in Hebrew day school. His uncle was in my class. When Alex talks about his family, we know the cast of characters.  The performance took place in the Hudson Theatre a wonderful 1904 theatre which was also home to the Jack Paar Show. A very enthusiastic usher told us the history of the theatre after we admired the beautiful glass light fixtures in the lobby. Why, yes they are designed by Tiffany Studios. The show was wonderful. It is a long yarn of a story with many excellent detours along the journey.  The journey was extra delicious for knowing so much of the inside baseball of Alex's life but clearly, given the roars of laughter around us, but equally as good for people who didn't grow up in the same tiny world as Alex. Like all people of his age group, Alex can take a good selfie. So there it is, proof that we were there. I have been work...

 Well, this has been a week with a great deal of progress on the restoration of the Schechter Mappah. I refreshed the lettering on the Ultrasuede panels with text. You see this panel  with two lines of text re-blackened. Here is the text for the kaddish re-blackened  and I hadn't yet repainted the cute little decorative elements. There are so many tasks that need to be done to restore this piece.  The next task that I was ready to tackle was edging the blue wool around the dome. This was a multi staged process. Stage one was stitching the wool around the edges of the Ultrasuede. That step required some X-ray vision, or more accurately some peeking beneath the surface to see that I was placing my stitches in the right place. The stitching both stabilizes the blue wool and serves as a guide line for the next step in the process. After I completed the row of stitching I trimmed the blue wool close to the stitching line so i could begin the next part of the job. Stage tw...

 Our windows were washed just before the scaffolding that had surrounded our building came down earlier this year. The forest fires in Canada have caused our windows to look like this. It may make sense to clean them after fire season comes to an end or before my widows just get too depressing. I am not going to think TOO hard about what that gunk is doing to my lungs. I have been working away at mending Chris's tallit. Each time I think I am done repairing the silk another broken bit appears. I  assumed that the gold gutta (the gold colored paste used to keep the silk paint colors from flowing into one another ) was damaged but it had also damaged the silk. I had to suture the tan painted silk to the turquoise and then chain stitch over the whole thing. The artist who made this tallit made two eyelets in each corner for the tzitzit. She looped the tzitzit through the two eyelets.  I don't think that the two holes are actually halachically OK and I have to do a bit of thi...