sarah in nyc

 My husband has a friend whose grandmother lived in Brooklyn. During the summers rather than going on an actual vacation she would sleep in a different bedroom for a couple of months. I have taken a similar work vacation. I am taking a break from the Schechter Mappah and going back to work on Alan's tallit.   I had calligraphed eight verses of Psalm 146, twice for two of the stripe panels earlier in the summer. It was time to tackle the other two renditions of Psalm 146. The white acrylic paint has a weirdly dry texture.  Eventually all four text stripe panels were completed. My goal in this tallit is to make it look like a standard issue tallit from a distance. I began stitching straight lines of black straight stitches starting from the outer edges of the tallit. Each row of stitching is a presser foot apart from the one next to it. I then added a black ribbon with a zig zag stitch. Here is the reverse of the  tallit. Unlike a garment, both the right side and ...

 Garrison Keillor told a wonderful joke on one of his annual joke shows abut a elderly man who came to the doctor with a broken leg. The doctor asked how the leg got broken and the man began, "Well fifty years ago I was a traveling salesman. A giant blizzard hit while I was on the road and I was finally able to find a farmhouse and the old farmer took me in. He had his daughter fed me supper and I was given an attic room to sleep in. A few moments after I got into bed the farmer's beautiful daughter knocked on the door, smiled and asked if I needed anything. I said that I was fine. She knocked on the door a few moments later and again I said that I had everything that I needed. I was fixing my roof earlier today and I finally understood what she meant and I fell off the roof." Shawna's mother in law hosted the meal of consolation after Shawna's burial. Before I get into the crux of the story there are some things that you need to know. The first is that Halifax ha...

 These past few weeks have been terribly difficult. Yes, I have deadlines looming  but that hasn't really been why things have been so difficult. I wasn't at liberty at write openly before, but nothing is stopping me now. I know that I'm not in elementary school anymore when one keeps a careful tally of who is your first best friend and who is your third best friend.  But  six months ago when I learned that my friend Shawna was very ill, I broke down sobbing. My husband commented that he thought that she might be my best friend.  Shawna and I met when we were nine or ten. Her older brother was having a bar mitzvah and my father was invited back to Halifax to officiate. The rest of the family was invited along. I met Shawna  and her younger sister Amy at an elegant tea held in a beautiful home. We were  girls  the same age and we hung out together through all of the festivities. Both of us remembered the menus from the events of that weekend decade...

 There is a gas station in New Jersey just after you cross the George Washington bridge called "Snaxit". In addition to selling gas, they are Shomrei Shabbat and all of the food that they sell is certified kosher. I have been whining to my husband about stopping off at Snaxit on our way out of the city for years.  A couple of weeks ago as we sped along the West Side Highway my husband mentioned that our rental car needed gas and this would be the day we we finally stop at Snaxit. I know that there are women who would be really excited by a visit to Tiffany's.  I was jumping up and down in the front seat and making up songs about the the possible wonders of Snaxit. While my husband got the car filled with gas I went in to check out the wonders of kosher gas station food shopping. My husband was hungry so I got him a bagel. I could have gotten him a pastrami sandwich, but he wasn't in the mood. In addition to the two fridges filled with cold sandwiches, a not quite exot...

 As many of you know, I am a self taught sewer.  Well, let me clarify that. I learned how to sew from obsessive reading of Threads Magazine back in the years when it was truly a creative source for people who worked with textiles, from sewing books, from the incredibly generous online sewing community and from my own many, many failures. In my earlier years sewing I used to think that underpinnings like interfacing and underlining were essentially dishonest.  What I have learned over the years is that rather than functioning as a fabric fib, interfacing and backing fragile fabrics with sturdier ones can extend the functional life of fabric. So as I re-construct the Schechter Mappah I keep figuring out way to make the piece last a long long time into the future. This time around, I have backed all of the silk that is being used in the "masonry" with the lovely Grateful Dead flannel that my son gave me. The flannel gives the silk a heftier, richer hand and hopefully will ke...

 For reasons that I don't understand, the work that I do comes in waves. there were years when most of my work was making chuppot,  wedding canpopies. Other years are filled with making nothing but challah covers or tallitot. This has been a year of mending.  There have been many, many mending projects that I have worked on over the past several months.  Several months ago my shul buddy Chris asked me if I would take on the task of mending his wedding tallit.  Chris and his wife are celebrating a big anniversary later this month. I love that Chris loves his wife so much, loves his marriage so much that it really mattered to him that his wedding tallit be fixed. The tallit was made by a sweet woman who was sort of a wild and wooly craft person. She painted Chris's tallit on China silk. China silk is a very pretty, inexpensive and fragile silk that shreds if  you sneeze.  Making a tallit out of China silk (this isn't just silk woven in China but a type o...